A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design Web design is the skill of creating presentations of content that is delivered to an end-user through the World Wide Web, using a Web browser or other Web-enabled software . The intent of web design is to create a website—a collection of electronic documents and applications that reside on a Web server/servers. The website may include text,, or a web page A web page or webpage is a document or resource of information that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a monitor or mobile device that lists the pages on a web site A website [citation needed] is a collection of related web pages, images, videos or other digital assets that are addressed relative to a common Uniform Resource Locator (URL), often consisting of only the domain name, or the IP address, and the root path ('/') in an Internet Protocol-based network. A web site is hosted on at least one web server,, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are generally presented in a list of results and are often called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike Web bots Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated find pages on the site.

While some developers argue that site index is a more appropriately used term to relay page function, web visitors are used to seeing each term and generally associate both as one and the same. However, a site index is often used to mean an A-Z index that provides access to particular content, while a site map provides a general top-down view of the overall site contents. These site maps are often used to show an index for users that belong to the YLC.

XML is a coding language used, (amongst many other things) as the standard for webcrawlers to find and parse sitemaps. There is an example of an XML sitemap below (missing link to site). The instructions to the sitemap are given to the crawler bot by a Robots Text file, an example of this is also given below. Site maps can improve search engine optimization Search engine optimization is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is especially important if a site uses a dynamic access to content such as Adobe Flash Adobe Flash is a multimedia platform used to add animation, video, and interactivity to Web pages. Flash is frequently used for advertisements and games. More recently, it has been positioned as a tool for "Rich Internet Applications" ("RIAs") or JavaScript JavaScript is an implementation of the ECMAScript language standard and is typically used to enable programmatic access to computational objects within a host environment. It can be characterized as a prototype-based object-oriented scripting language that is dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is also considered a functional menus that do not include HTML HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of "tags" surrounded by angle brackets within the web page content links.

They also act as a navigation aid [1] by providing an overview of a site's content at a single glance.

Contents

Benefits of XML sitemaps to search-optimize Flash sites

Below is an example of a validated XML sitemap for a simple three page web site. Sitemaps are a useful tool for making sites built in Flash and other non-html languages searchable. Note that because the website's navigation is built with Flash (Adobe), the initial homepage of a site developed in this way would probably be found by an automated search program (ref: bot) However, the subsequent pages are unlikely to be found without an XML sitemap.

XML sitemap example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.example.com/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com</loc>
<lastmod> 2009-09-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/?id=who</loc>
<lastmod> 2009-09-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/?id=what</loc>
<lastmod> 2009-09-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/?id=how</loc>
<lastmod> 2009-09-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

XML Sitemaps

Sitemap Generation Tool

Google Google Inc. is a multinational public cloud computing, Internet search, and advertising technologies corporation. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the " introduced Google Sitemaps The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs so web developers can publish lists of links from across their sites. The basic premise is that some sites have a large number of dynamic pages that are only available through the use of forms and user entries. The Sitemap files can then be used to indicate to a web crawler A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner or in an orderly fashion. Other terms for Web crawlers are ants, automatic indexers, bots, or Web spiders, Web robots, or—especially in the FOAF community—Web scutters how such pages can be found. Bing Bing is the current web search engine (advertised as a "decision engine") from Microsoft. Bing was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009 at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego. It went fully online on June 3, 2009, with a preview version released on June 1, 2009, Google Google Inc. is a multinational public cloud computing, Internet search, and advertising technologies corporation. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the ", Yahoo Yahoo! Inc. is an American public corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, (in Silicon Valley), that provides Internet services worldwide. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine (Yahoo! Search), Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping (Yahoo! Maps), video sharing (Yahoo! Video) and Ask Ask is a search engine founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original search engine software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Chevsky, Justin Grant, and others built the early AskJeeves.com website around that core engine. Three venture capital firms, Highland Capital Partners, now jointly support the Sitemaps protocol.

Since Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and Google use the same protocol[2], having a Sitemap lets the four biggest search engines A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are generally presented in a list of results and are often called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike Web have the updated page information. Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee indexing. However, a Sitemap is still the best insurance for getting a search engine to learn about your entire site.[3]

XML Sitemaps have replaced the older method of "submitting to search engines" by filling out a form on the search engine's submission page. Now web developers submit a Sitemap directly, or wait for search engines to find it.

XML Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards (eXtensible Markup Language) is much more precise than HTML HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of "tags" surrounded by angle brackets within the web page content coding. Errors are not tolerated, and so syntax must be exact. It is advised to use an XML syntax validator such as the free one found at: http://validator.w3.org

There are automated XML site map generators available (both as software Computer software, or just software, is the collection of computer programs and related data that provide the instructions telling a computer what to do. The term was coined to contrast to the old term hardware . In contrast to hardware, software is intangible, meaning it "cannot be touched". Software is also sometimes used in a more and web applications In system software, a web application is an application that is accessed over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. The term may also mean a computer software application that is hosted in a browser-controlled environment [citation needed] or coded in a browser-supported language (such as JavaScript, combined with a browser-rendered) for more complex sites.

More information defining the field operations and other Sitemap options are defined at http://www.sitemaps.org (Sitemaps.org: Google, Inc., Yahoo, Inc., and Microsoft Corporation)

See also Robots.txt The Robot Exclusion Standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol, is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is otherwise publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorize and archive web sites, or by webmasters to, which can be used to identify sitemaps on the server.

See also

References

  1. ^ Site Map Usability Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, August 12, 2008
  2. ^ Specification of the common XML format
  3. ^ Joint announcement from Google, Yahoo, Bing supporting Sitemaps

External links

Categories: Search engine optimization Categories: Internet search engines | Internet marketing by method | Web design

 

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