A sitemap is a guide in a website that contains links to all the other pages in the website.  It helps search engine crawlers and internet users to find the information and content they are looking for.  Typically, a sitemap is organized in a hierarchical fashion with the most authoritative pages being listed higher up in the document. The URLs and links to different pages on a website are contained in sitemap files. These links are placed together so that web crawlers can easily find them and redirect users to the content and information they are looking for. Since, Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing use the same sitemap protocol, having a sitemap in your website greatly enhances the online visibility of your website. It is therefore that you create a sitemap, which can be done with the aid of a website mapping tool like DYNO Mapper.

Typically, every website must have at least two different types of sitemaps, XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps. The XML sitemap is essential for proper indexing, crawling of pages on your website by search engines while HTML is designed for web users and placed on the home page of the site. A single XML sitemap is recommended for basic and small websites with about hundred pages. Creating both sitemaps is effortless, especially when using a sitemap generator. There are however many other compatible formats you can have, but at the moment, the two are highly recommended. Irrespective of the type of format, you may have to create more than one sitemap for a single website, depending on the site’s size.

Multiple Sitemaps

The main reason that necessitates the need to have multiple sitemaps is the size of the site. Sitemaps come with size limitations in that one sitemap cannot hold more than 50,000 URLS and should not be more than 10MB in size. As such, when you have a site that has over 50,000 URLs, then you need to have multiple sitemaps that can accommodate these links.  Size limitations are very vital in ensuring that web servers are not overloaded by large files served to search engines.

If you use multiple sitemaps in your website, it is important that you create a Sitemap Index File. This file acts like a sitemap for all the sitemaps you have in your site. The file lists all the sitemaps in the site in one collective folder for easy crawling by search engines. Multiple sitemaps should only be used when your site requirements exceed the size limitations provided for a single sitemap file.  For simple additions and updates in the website, you need not create an additional sitemap as search engines are able to pick up these updates when crawling your site.

Updating a sitemap is not the same as creating multiple sitemaps. Obviously, if there is a significant update on your sitemap you should consider having the sitemap re-crawled so that you can keep your site within the relevant search results according to different search queries.

Why You Need Multiple Sitemaps

The main reason why you should consider adding more than one sitemaps is not only to minimize crowding of links, but also to ensure that all pages are crawled and indexed by the search engines. Multiple sitemaps are very efficient in classifying and categorizing the content in a website. This may not necessarily increase your website’s PageRank but enhances better online visibility. Also, having multiple sitemaps helps achieve better search engine optimization. For instance, if your site is a content directory website with several authors, creating multiple sitemaps each for every author allows their articles to be easily found when by the search engine bots.

Creating a Sitemap Index

If you have created multiple sitemaps for your site, then you should consider creating a sitemap index, which is a file that simply lists all the sitemaps in the website. It is important to note that this index can only be used in specifying sitemaps in the same domain. The steps that need to be followed when creating this index are similar to those followed when creating a sitemap. The only difference is that the <loc> and </loc> tags should contain values on the location of the sitemaps as opposed to location of pages in the site.

The concept of creating multiple sitemaps is not only suitable for large sites as it can also be used by small sites that are growing at a fast pace. The structure that you will use when creating several sitemaps for your websites is determined by the depth of your web pages in terms of the content in each of the sections in the sites.

Errors To Avoid When Creating Multiple Sitemaps

When creating multiple sitemaps or any sitemap in your site, it is important to ensure that there are no white spaces preceding the tags. This leads to broken links and search engines may not be able to crawl your website correctly if links are not complete and may have a negative effect on your SEO. You also need to ensure that plugins are well coded to prevent conflicts between the site plugins and search engines thus resulting to a 404 error (site not found) when users are redirected to your website. In addition to this, you also need to ensure that you save the settings of your site’s permalinks properly so that the plugins in the site can allow the creation of multiple sitemaps.

How Many Sitemaps Are Required

The major determinant of the number of sitemaps needed by a website is the content and site’s size. For a small website, there is no need for a compulsory HTML sitemap since visitors can easily find needed information without any stress as the web pages are physically visible. An XML sitemap is however recommended for such websites especially those with blogs that have quality and frequently updated contents for search engine ranking.

Websites with Multilingual Content

Multiple sitemaps are advisable for websites that have multilingual content. With a reliable XML website mapping tool like DYNO Mapper, your website will have different sitemaps to manage all the languages and their peculiarities. The XML sitemap file can localize online users’ searches to the various language requirements of your visitors by targeting and matching them with their respective language.

Dividing your XML sitemap file into units and segments makes it easier for future changes. It must be well nested for easy discovery of modified or deleted pages. The organization of the content is the major reason for having sitemap on your website. Use a website mapping tool to create, submit and update multiple sitemaps. 

The use of a sitemap generator and other content management tools is not reserved for specific individuals or businesses. Generally, everyone involved in content creation, website management, internet marketing is concerned about the performance of the site, especially in meeting business objectives. A sitemap generator enables one to create useful sitemaps fast; saving time and resources. However, the following are the most common users of a website mapping tool such as DYNO Mapper.

Content Managers

Creation of content is a tedious process, and costly. It is therefore only reasonable that you ensure that all pages of a website are well indexed by the search engines and users can find the information with ease. This is possible with the help of XML and HTML sitemaps that can be created using a sitemap generator. Search engines’ bots take time to naturally crawl websites and therefore invaluable and urgent information may not be delivered as expected if the content is not indexed in time. It is the duty of content managers to see to it that stakeholders get the required information on schedule for business. Using a sitemap generator, web content managers can ensure that the indexed process is accelerated to meet this very important objective. Other than content managers, content creators, writers, individuals tasked with content updating may also find sitemap generators useful.

Marketers and SEO Experts

Exposure is the pillar of success in business; the more exposed products and/or services are, the higher the conversion rates and profits. Therefore, it is crucial that online marketers and search engines optimization experts use sitemap generators to boost the website’s ranking in SERPs and expose the products and services more to the customers and potential clients. Sitemaps play a very important role in SEO by guiding the search engines to all the pages on the site. Page ranks are assigned based on the number and quality of incoming and outbound links, uniqueness of content and the size as well. By seeing to it that as many web pages as possible are indexed, then the SEO benefit is reaped. Furthermore, the URL descriptions in sitemaps are usually keyword-rich, making it perfect for search engines optimization. Therefore, SEO experts and online marketers benefit a lot from sitemap creators.

Webmasters

Webmasters understand the technicalities of running websites. They interact with the site on a daily basis and therefore should offer guidance to the rest of the team on what is best for the business. In fact, they take the lead when creating sitemaps because they definitely have advanced coding knowledge and can ensure that the sitemaps are error-free and submitted as expected. Even though the other personnel are free to create sitemaps, they should do so in close consultation with the webmasters. To save them time to manually create sitemaps, webmasters are encouraged to use sitemap generators and if possible customize a few areas to meet various expectations. It must however be pointed out sitemap creation, just like other content management activities is a multi-disciplinary affair that should bring on board everyone involved in the content lifecycle.

Bloggers

Creation and use of sitemaps is not just meant for commercial purposes. Whether you blog for fun or money, you sure will find sitemaps irresistible. First, blogging is time-bound. Some blog items have to be published fast and fresh. This is only possible if the information is indexed equally fast or else the competition can scoop the stories and take credit for the same. Some blogs have so many pages because they have been published over a long period of time. To ensure that some content, including the archived files are still accessible by the search engines, you should use a sitemaps generator.

User Experience Designers

Website design is diverse. The focus of any designer is to come up with a unique website that will meet users’ expectations. This is however never guaranteed because of the dynamic nature of the web and ever changing user requirements. However, a majority of web surfers are information seekers. Therefore, ensuring that they get access to this information with ease is very important. User experience designers are mandated to realize this by providing a sitemap’s page on the homepage and carefully listing all the URLs on the site. Furthermore, the designer has to categorize the information for easy access by the users. Using a sitemaps generator will serve this purpose to perfection.

Competitors

Though not very common, you might want to snoop around your competitors’ website just to understand the nature and size of their content. In as much as you cannot qualify this as a sitemap since it will not be submitted, the sitemap generator will still give you the details about the website. You can then understand your competitors’ page descriptions, number of pages, keywords and such factors that can come in handy when improving your site’s content and overall user experience.

In as much as different people may want to use sitemap generators for varied reasons, the most important factor to bear in mind is that everything is being done to improve the experience of the customer on the site. It is good for business and SEO because if a user finds your site useful, they sure will want to come back for more. In fact, they may even recommend a few friends and relatives to the website and the significance of referrals doesn’t require any emphasis.

There are quite a number of sitemap creation tools but not all are effective. Before you even consider creating a sitemap, it is important to find the best tool for guaranteeing the best experience. You need a tool that will allow you do much more than just create sitemaps. You obviously would love a system that will bring forth very reliable results with very minimal errors. At the moment, DYNO Mapper is the best because it has more features than most tools in the market. Creating sitemaps is now easy, fast and cost-effective because the tool gets the job done as you relax and worry about other aspects of your business. Try it today.

Not many websites have sitemaps installed for various reasons, but in most cases it is due to a lack of technical know-how but you can just use a sitemap creator. Creating a sitemap is a skill that requires proper understanding of how search engines crawl and index content online. As you create a sitemap whether manually or with the aid of a sitemap tool, it is paramount that you optimize it to deliver the required objective. There are several ways this can be realized, simply by customizing the process in the editor of the sitemap generator you are using. They include, but not limited to:

1. Prioritization of web pages
2. Content categorization
3. Restrict the number or URLs per sitemap
4. Proper keyword-rich descriptions
5. Having the sitemap page on the homepage.

Page Prioritization

The Google sitemaps protocol provides for users to rank web pages on a scale of 0.1 to 1.0. Web pages with higher ranks are crawled more often by the bots than those with a lower rank. Bearing this in mind, encourage the search engines to frequently visit pages that are dynamic in nature, based on the frequency in which they are updated. A default average of 0.5 is assigned for all the pages, but search engines discourage users from assigning high ranks for all the pages. Pages such as contact us are rarely updated and therefore there is no need for frequent crawling. On the other hand, blogs and news-related pages should be assigned higher priorities because they are often updated. Doing this using a sitemap creator is pretty easy.

Place the Sitemap on the Homepage & Root Directory

HTML sitemaps are primarily designed for web surfers, but search engines also find them invaluable. The placement of a sitemap is very important because it simplifies access to information. Naturally, most web users start navigating a website from the homepage, proceeding to categories and sub categories. Having the sitemap installed on a site’s homepage will therefore ensure that users can find the required information by browsing through the listed URLs and clicking on the right one without a hassle as opposed to clicking one section to another. On the other hand, the search engines also start crawling from the homepage (in most cases) and proceeding to other pages. If new links have been added, then it will be easier and faster to be found. It is therefore important that you ensure that the sitemap page is strategically placed for easy identification by the users. For XML sitemaps, install them on the site’s root directory.

Content Categorization

Most web structures have the homepage, then categories and sub-categories, in that order. Each section covers a specific area of business, which simplifies access to information. The same should apply when you create a sitemap; have the links categorized based on the commonality of the content. If it is an ecommerce website, for example, you may have categories such as fashion, electronics, among others then sub categories covering specific areas of the above. Proper categorization is also good for SEO because you end up with lots of keyword-rich content clumped together, which will influence the final ranking of the site on the SERPs.

Limit the Number of URLs For Each Sitemap

The number of URLs to include on every sitemap depends on the size of the website. Some really comprehensive sitemap generators like DYNO Mapper enable users to restrict the number of links on every sitemap, say a maximum of 50,000 or thereabout. If you have more pages, you can choose to create multiple sitemaps to meet varied needs and expectations. If your categories have sufficient content to fill up a sitemap, you can generate a sitemap for each of these sections. Alternatively, you can choose to only include specific pages that you deem important in your sitemap for the best experience. Limiting the number of URLs is important because overcrowding links will not only confuse users but may be mistaken by search engines for a link farm.

Keyword-Rich Link Descriptions and Titles

See to it that every link is accompanied by a keyword-rich description about the content. It doesn’t have to be a narrative, but a brief about what information users can get by clicking on these links. You will not only save the users’ time who will go direct to the relevant information, but also create a sitemap page rich in targeted keywords. This is very important for the search engines ranking and some websites have sitemap pages that rank higher than any other page. This is one of the most important ways to optimize your sitemap because you appeal to the search engines more and you stand to attract more traffic to the site. The same should apply to the titles, ensuring that you incorporate at least one major keyword in it.

Identify and Fix Error Messages

Users feel annoyed whenever they click on a dead link. This means that they cannot access the information on the link, which can really be frustrating. When you create a sitemap, it is paramount that you pay close attention to the links because they form the basis on which sitemaps operate. There are instances when some links may end up with the wrong description. To optimize your sitemap, endeavor to ensure that all links lead to their relevant content so that users and search engines are not misled.

Keep Your Sitemap Updated

It is now easier to automatically update the sitemap; thanks to DYNO Mapper website mapping tool. Whenever new content is created and uploaded to the website, the tool will automatically update the sitemap when you click refresh. In as much as this can be automated, there is no harm in manually reviewing and ensuring that everything is in order.

Creating a sitemap requires proper understanding of all major search engines and how they crawl and index sites and how users interact with the content on a website. To get the best from your sitemap, consider the above factors and get the best from your effort. Don’t forget that to create a sitemap is a multi-disciplinary affair requiring the inputs of a team involved in various aspects of website design, redesign and content management. 

A sitemap is basically a web page on a website that contains links to other pages within the website - usually organized in a way that  the page is useful to humans (HTML sitemaps) and search engines (XML sitemaps). A sitemap contains metadata for all URLs on aspects such as each page’s frequency of updates, relative importance and last update, etc.

While any page that has links to each page on your website may be useful to some extent, a sitemap must apply the use of XML with the code having to follow a given pattern for it to be as efficient as possible as far as providing precise information to search engines is concerned. A sitemap is useful as it provides one location from where a search engine can access all the web pages in a specific site without crawling the whole site on a page-by-page basis, in what may be several link layers. When you want to create a sitemap, here is what you need to do:

Basic Format

Every sitemap should be enclosed in the tags <urlsetxmlns=“[namespace]”>> and </urlset> and all the pages within the sitemap should include, at least, the <url> and <loc> tags, both of which should be enclosed. Optional tags that can be included are <lastmod>, <changefreq>, and <priority>.

Here is an example of a sitemap that has two entries using all of the required as well as optional tags:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.indigodesigncompany.com</loc>

`      <lastmod>2015-06-1</lastmod>

      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

      <priority>0.8</priority>

   </url>

   <url>

      <loc>http://www.indigodesigncompany.com/blog</loc>

      <lastmod>2015-06-1</lastmod>

      <changefreq>yearly</changefreq>

      <priority>0.4</priority>

   </url>

</urlset>

In the sitemap above, there are two pages; the main page and the “Blog” page. The last modification dates are set and their relative priority and change frequency indicated. The change frequency does not have to be specifically exact and the priority is fully subjective; it shows how you as the site owner feel the page relates to other pages on the website.

What do Sitemap tags mean?

Required Tags

• <urlset> and </urlset> tags; These tags inform search engines like Google the beginning and end of the sitemap. Begin the pages’ list immediately after the <urlset> tag and finish it before the </urlset> closing tag.
• <url> and </url> tags: These tags provide information to the search engine on where the details of each page in the sitemap starts and ends. These tags enclose all the other tags used for each page.
• <loc> and </loc> tags: These tags are very important as they provide information to a search engine on the location of the page. Without page location details, then all the other details and information is useless.

Optional Tags

• <lastmod> and </lastmod> tags: (Last Modified Date): These tags provide information on the last modification of the page. They use the format YYYY-MM-DD. For any number less than 10, always remember to include a leading zero. For instance, 2010-07-29 instead of 2010-7-29.
• <changefreq> and </changefreq> tags (Change Frequency): These tags provide information to search engines on the likelihood of the page changing. This information may not necessarily be exact and the search engine may decide to visit the page more or less frequently than it is indicated. For instance, if the change frequency is set on an hourly basis, and your page does not have a high ranking, Google may settle on visiting after every few days or less often. The possible values of this tag include:
  • Always: This shows that a page is dynamic and changes at all times when accessed for example in a weather monitoring site
  • Hourly
  • Daily
  • Weekly
  • Monthly
  • Yearly
• <priority> and </priority> tags:  These tags inform search engines on the importance of the page in comparison to other pages on your website according to the site owner. This probably the least useful tags because in majority of websites as mostly, search engines identify the pages that are more relevant to a specific search.

Non-Alphanumeric Characters

An ideal sitemap escapes all entities and only contains ASCII letters, numbers and certain symbols. Entities are characters with a special meaning in URLs or in HTML. The ones that need to be escaped include:

• & — The ampersand character must always be written as &amp;
• ' — The single quote character must always be written as &apos;
• " — The double quote character must always be written as &quot;
• < — The less than symbol must always be written as &lt;
• > — The greater than symbol must always be written as &gt;

If there are non English alphabetical letters such as ç, ñ, or ü in your URLs, then you need to use the code for such characters.

Where a Sitemap File should Be Inserted

Under normal circumstances, a sitemap can only catalog URLs that are in or under the specific directory where the sitemap is located.  Therefore, if for instance you have an online store in a store directory and want to catalog both the pages of the store and your regular site pages, then you should put your Sitemap file in the most preferred directory you want to catalog; usually the site’s “root web directory”. The name of the directory may take different forms such as httpdocs, public html, www, wwwroot or anything else.

Validating your Sitemap before Submission

It is important to validate your Sitemap to ensure that there are no errors before submitting it.  This saves you great trouble and problems in the long run.

Submitting Your Sitemap

There are 3 methods you can use to submit your Sitemap to different search engines. These include:

1. This method is the simplest of the three though it requires you to ensure that your site is occasionally visited by search engines for the method to work. If your site is new or you are experiencing trouble in making it popular in search engines, consider using the Direct Search Engine Submission method.

Add Sitemap:http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml to your robots.txt file and the Sitemap will automatically be picked by the search engine, the next time it crawls your site.

1. HTTP Request: This method allows you to submit a Sitemap or an update it by directly typing the following: (Note that some search engines may require you to have an existing account with them  or use your domain name in the place of “yoursite.com”)
2. Direct Search Engine Submission: This is most time consuming method of the three methods as you must access each of the search engines individually. However, necessarily need not do this as the main search engines are able to automatically read the robots.txt file to locate your Sitemap file.

• Bing: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
• Google:http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
• Yahoo:http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml (change YahooDemo to your App ID)

Requirements

• Google: Ensure that you have a Google Webmaster Tools Account and submit your Sitemap through your account’s interface.
• Yahoo: Just like in submitting a Sitemap through Google, submit through your Yahoo Site Explorer (create an account if you do not have an existing one).
• Bing: Create an MSN account (if you already have an account, you don’t need to create a new one), then submit your Sitemap via the Bing Webmaster Center.

Sitemap Limits

An individual sitemap file should have a size of not more than 10MB and may contain nor more than 50,000 URLs. If your website exceeds these limits, then you should consider using multiple Sitemap files.

Today, most webmasters have resorted to using sitemap generators such as DYNO Mapper that is faster and guarantees a higher accuracy when creating sitemaps. You therefore don’t have to worry about the complicated codes. 

With more than one billion websites currently in existence, competition for online presence and visibility is rife. Online businesses are investing a lot in marketing to push their sites on top of SERPs. There are so many SEO strategies that website owners can choose from but for the best results, it is advisable that you try out everything legit and acceptable. For starters, you can start by learning how to create a sitemap. Sitemaps contribute to search engine optimization and provide a more reliable plan to get all of your pages indexed by search engines.

Page Rank Defined

Page Rank is a search engine algorithm that assigns numerical preferences to websites depending on the relevance of the content in the site based on specific search criteria. The higher the page rank of a website, the more popular the site becomes and the higher the internet traffic to the website. This algorithm is based on the number of pages linking to your site and the quality and quantity of content. Bogus and spammed links are easily detected by the algorithm and sites that have these are penalized and do not ranked.

Sitemap Defined

A sitemap is simply a directory or a guide that contains information and details on the pages in your website as well as the content in these pages.  Search engines like Google crawl sitemaps to identify and detect any information that is relevant to a specific search query. Pages on this guide are listed in a hierarchical order, whereby the most relevant pages are placed at the top of the list and the least relevant pages at the bottom.

There are mainly two sitemap types: XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps. XML sitemaps are structured uniquely such that they are not visible to users but inform search engines on the content in the pages of a site, how often the content in these pages are updated and the relative importance of the pages to each other.

HTML sitemaps are structured for use by the internet users to help them find the content they are looking for in a website. These sitemaps do not include all the pages in a website.  This makes it easy for search engines and internet users find the information they are interested in from a site. When you want to create a sitemap, it is important to understand that some sitemap formats cannot be submitted in Google Webmaster tools; only supported formats can be submitted.

SEO Defined

SEO (Search Engine Optimizing) refers to the concept of optimizing the content in a website using commonly used keywords.  This is so that once an internet user enters a specific set of keywords in a search engine, the content in the website is highlighted in the results thereby making the site visible to the user.  Search engines rely on the placement of keywords in the content published in websites to give the most relevant search results.

Sitemaps and SEO: The Relationship

Gone are the days when SEO was enough for your website to enjoy high ranking in search engines and great online visibility. Currently, there is stiff competition between websites as they try to outdo each other in getting the highest rank possible in search engines.  This has led to the use of sitemaps and SEO together for better rankings in search engines.

When search engines crawl websites, they check for .txt and Meta tags in the sites among other relevant data that might guide in rating the significance of the content to the search queries. When you create a sitemap, such as HTML sitemap and place it on the home page of a website and ensure that it contains all the pages on the site. This enables website visitors to access all the information about each of the pages in the website fright there by accessing a single page. As a result the number of pages crawled and indexed by the search engines increase, leading to higher page rank.

XML sitemaps enables site owners to feed the specific data about the pages they would like crawled by search engines. In addition to this, site owners are able to set the hierarchy / priority of the website’s content and view additional information such as the last time the content was updated. When you create a sitemap and understand this information, such as the keyword searches, you can then create more keyword-specific content for the site, resulting in higher rank in the search engines.  

When you create HTML Sitemaps, for example, you must ensure that each link is accompanied by a brief description about the content it carries. As you work on the descriptions, you definitely will add keywords about the information, and as a result, the search engines may find the sitemap page to be keyword-rich. If this happens, you can attain a higher ranking in SERPs.

Why are Sitemaps Important in Search Engine Optimization?

The main use of search engines is to provide internet users with information on the best websites to get the information and services they are looking for. As such, they act as a directory that index information from websites and make this information available to users upon request.  The main importance of sitemaps to SEO is that they enable search engines to crawl websites and collect this information, making it available whenever anyone in the world makes a specific search.  

Sitemaps boost a website’s SEO efforts greatly thereby enhancing the ranking of websites in search engines. With high search engine rankings, websites become visible to as many internet users thereby increasing the site’s traffic.  

You can use different website mapping tools  to  create a sitemap for a website, which should then be submitted to the search engines’ webmaster tools.  This whole process is effortless, especially if you are using a sitemap generator. For the best results, keep the sitemap updated whenever you add any new information to the site. You not only ensure that your content is found by the search engines, but also users get access to this very important information.