There are different types of Sitemaps, each with their intended purpose. The history of Sitemaps dates back to the 2000s, having been officially launched by Google, the search engine giant in 2005. A year later, other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing adopted a common sitemap protocol, entering a unique marriage because very few competitors run joint projects sucsh as sitemaps. Sitemaps are designed for use by search engines as well as internet users. When you create a sitemap, you can choose from various formats, even though most sitemap generators support two main formats; HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps.

XML Sitemaps

The basic XML Sitemap file takes any name you give it and does not necessarily have to be stored in the website root directory (even though it is ideal to store it there). The file needs to be a UTF-8 (encoded) text file, meaning that URLs with some special characters should use entity escaping, so that the URLs in the Sitemap are rightly crawled by search engines. XML sitemaps can be stored in an uncompressed form, submitted as .XML files or compressed in gzip format and then submitted as .GZ files.

The XML Sitemap protocol comes with a set of structured XML tags, with some of the tags being mandatory while others are optional. This allows webmasters to define specific details about their pages as they create a sitemap. These details include the URL, the last modification date of the page, and the frequency of content modification as well as the page’s rated priority to other pages included in the Sitemap.

XML Sitemap files come with file size limitations in that they cannot exceed 10MB and can only contain a maximum of 50,000 URL entries. Since this size limitation is unfavorable for enterprise-size websites, the Sitemap Index file doubles as a Sitemap XML protocol refinement thus enabling Sitemap Index file to reference up to 50,000 individual Sitemap files with each of these files accommodating up to 50,000 links, totaling to more than 2.5 billion links. Creating multiple sitemaps is therefore highly recommended for sites with thousands of links.

HTML Sitemaps

HTML sitemaps are actually real web pages that contain links to all pages in your website. The number of HTML sitemaps to have is dependent on the size of your site. If it is small, then you can have one HTML sitemap but if yours is a enterprise-size site, the sitemap  will most probably be designed as content archives organized by section and then divided into different publication dates.

One of the most outstanding aspects about a HTML sitemap is that it links to all the published content on your site. If, for instance you have a large news site with your pages listing only 24-48 hours of new stories before they are delinked by the running pages on the website, an XML Sitemap supplies these links to be crawled, but still it is not good enough. In this case, when you use a content archive option, you provide more than one link in the running site to all published pages. This makes it easy for human readers to find their favorite stories in future. This is also important when you create a content inventory for the site because you can still access your old stories in one place and improve on them.

RSS Feeds

Sitemaps can also come in other formats like Atom feeds or RSS feeds. It is recommended that if your site publishes several new pages daily, you should find a way to properly present and archive them for the future. RSS feeds inject the Freshness Index of search engines as they are read more often daily, by the search engine bots. Once you publish your pages, the search engines will crawl the information in these pages immediately.

Tips on how to create RSS feeds for your site

• Make sure it has less than 500 URLs or not more than the last 7 days’ published content links. Since it is a freshness update, you should keep it fresh and clean.
• Make sure your RSS feed link remains constant-does not change from time to time.

Avoid using date stamps as well as other incremental notations in these files as this can result in feeds’ URL to change every time it is generated, search engines will find it difficult to effectively crawl such links.

Video Sitemaps

If your website publishes new and original video content, search engines should be informed accordingly. Videos are exceptionally hard to index, and therefore you have to include accurate metadata with each item you publish. Doing this makes the media relevant to search queries. Before creating your video Sitemap, it is important to ensure that you carefully review the protocol specifications. Once you have created the sitemap, follow the instructions and submit it to the search engine’s webmaster tools.

Mobile Sitemaps

A mobile sitemap is ideal for site owners with a large number of pages on their site dedicated for use by mobile device browsers and have not yet invested in a responsive design of their sites.  This sitemap adds new tags and identifies listed links as mobile content. With more people accessing the web via mobile, it is highly recommended that you create mobile sitemaps for your site.

Image Sitemaps

You should create an Image Sitemap if your website is rich in images (especially original content), and you want to have all or nearly all of the images in your site indexed. By creating an Image Sitemap, you it easy for search engines to define the most relevant and important images on the site to be presented during search queries.

Text File Format

For sites with few pages, the .txt extension file type is the simplest text file format to use in creating a Sitemap. With the use of a Notepad and other simple text editors, you can easily create a text Sitemap. Here are the general guidelines to follow when you want to create your text Sitemap:

• Feed one link per line.
• URLs/links should not have any line breaks or contain any other information.
• The URL must be written in full including the http section.

Additionally, each search engine may put in place other guidelines that include:

• The number of URLs in one file should not be more than 50,000. If your site has over 50,000 URLs, then you should use multiple text files.
• Text file size must not exceed 10MB (10,485,760 bytes).
• Text file should use UTF-8 encoding thus you should save your file in the UTF-8 format.

Depending on the size and nature of your website, you cannot afford to manage a site without at least two of the above sitemap formats. Other formats can be optional, but HTML and XML sitemaps are highly recommended. Use a sitemap generator such as DYNO Mapper to create sitemaps of your choice fast. 

The importance of sitemaps doesn’t require any emphasis. It is currently very important that every webmaster creates and submits a sitemap to the search engines. A sitemap is basically a list of URLs that describe a website’s sections and pages. The most common sitemap is the HTML-formatted one, but XML sitemaps are also common. Others such as text sitemaps are currently not so common but still useful in some cases. A sitemap is supposed to ensure that users and search engine bots find specific content irrespective of their location on the website. Naturally, websites are crawled periodically by bots but this is unpredictable. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that even during the crawling, all pages will be identified and indexed by the search engines.

Manual Sitemap Creation

Introduced in 2005 by the search engines giant, Google and later adopted by other search engines such as Bing and Yahoo, this innovation was motivated by the fact that some websites have thousands of web pages that cannot easily be crawled as required. There are two main ways to create a sitemap: manually or with the use of a sitemap generator. Creating sitemaps manually is not only time-consuming and tiresome, but also requires average to advanced knowledge of targeted markup languages such as HTML and XML. More than 95% of website owners have very basic IT background and therefore might not be in a position to manually generate sitemaps.

Due to the importance of sitemaps to websites, developers sought to simplify the process of creating, submitting and updating sitemaps. This led to the introduction of sitemap generators that lets users to automatically create, validate, submit and update sitemaps. These tools are amazing at not only speeding up the process but guarantee increased accuracy. Irrespective of the tool you use, there are two main types of sitemap generators; free/limited and premium sitemap generators. Note that there are many sitemap plugins as well but they also fall under the above two broad categories; you are either paying for the service or getting it for free. As you run the sitemap generator, you can engage in other important business activities, waiting for the process to be completed.

Free Sitemap Generators

Creators of sitemap generators usually offer a free version targeting some users, say those who own small websites or would like to try out the service before paying for the same. Mostly, the limited versions have very basic features. In most cases, the number of websites and web pages you can include in a single sitemap is limited. Due to this, they are not very reliable for individuals with websites with many pages. Furthermore, they may not include other features that are reserved for premium users.

These are the most feature packed sitemap generators; you not only get a chance to generate, submit and keep your sitemaps updated, but also get to enjoy many other features. There are various plans, designed to meet a myriad of needs; feel free to go for one that meets your specific requirements. Note that in most cases, you are allowed to unsubscribe at will. Some of the most outstanding features of premium sitemap generators include;

1. Up to 50,000 pages for each sitemap you create. This makes it an ideal choice for websites with many pages constantly updated
2. You can create any type of sitemap you like; XML, HTML, mobile sitemaps, name it. There are other extras you might be interested in for creating sitemaps for images, videos, news, RSS feeds, among others.
3. Ideal for large website by having a certain number of URLs, such as 50,000 per sitemap and adheres to the Google sitemap protocol like creation of a sitemap index.
4. The generator will detect and report any broken links that can be harmful to the site’s ranking because they interrupt the crawling process. This way, you can proceed and fix such links fast and retain the robots.
5. The sitemap generators notify the search engines automatically after the sitemap has been created.
6. They are compatible with different types of websites such as forums, blogs, ecommerce websites, portals, plus many more.
7. Auto-refresh capability which ensures that your sitemap can be updated whenever you want.

Sitemaps also lets you prioritize pages so that that the robots are guided to crawl and index those that have a higher rank from 0.1-1.0. The average priority rank is 0.5 but users are discouraged from assigning higher ranks to all the pages; only rank highly pages that are frequently updated. Others such as contact us that are rarely changed don’t have to be prioritized highly.

Sitemap Plugins Vs. Sitemap Generators

There are many installable plugins that you can download and install on your website CMS. How do plugins compare to sitemap generators? Well, they serve the same purpose, but the main difference lies in the way this is done. Plugins are installed on the sitemap whilst you don’t have to install the sitemap generators. You may have to purchase some while others are free of charge and can be downloaded online with ease.

Sitemap Generators and SEO

Websites exists so that the information they contain can be found by users. It is therefore every website owner’s dream to attain the highest possible ranking in SERPs. Creating, submitting and updating sitemaps using a sitemap generator will go a long way in ensuring that you gain higher rankings in SERPs for your target keywords.

The secret to getting the best from a sitemap generator lies in understanding your specific requirements. We might have many tools in the market, but there is no guarantee that all of them are effective. You should therefore take your time, scrutinize these tools and only settle for one that offers real value for your money. At the moment, DYNO Mapper is the best, try it and move your business to the next level of unimaginable success. Creating and updating sitemaps is effortless and worthwhile. 

It takes time to conduct a comprehensive content audit. Actually, it might even take up to a couple of weeks or months to thoroughly assess content on all of the pages from a website. The duration is however pegged on the website’s size and the objective of the audit. Most website owners still don’t understand why it is very important to create an inventory for their content. You may generate very creative content but if you don’t understand your current content, you may not be in position to come up with fresh content to meet your customer needs.

The significance of conducting a comprehensive website content audit is best understood by content strategist who know that it is worth the time and financial investment it attracts. Automating the content inventory with DYNO Mapper is not only another way to save your operational costs, but it can also save time. Businesses exist to make profits and therefore, every investment you make should be geared towards generating more income for the business.

Understand Your Content

The best business investments are executed with deep research and understanding of a customer needs. Your content is crucial, not only its existence but also the environment in which they were generated, published and modified and the objectives they were intended for. You truly have to know what works and what doesn’t. In the end, your end value is enhanced by the relationship between your content and customers and you must learn how best you can improve so that all your customers’ needs are met.

The fact is, most large and multinational companies do not remember to carry out a thorough content audit whenever they re-launch. As a result of this negligence, most companies have had to endure many days of endless work at a higher cost whenever there is need for content migration. Some companies conduct quick content inventories that lack detail, which in the end results in the failure to account for some important missing content In the end, a planned website launch may have to be delayed since some of the content may just be discovered towards the end of the project. Due diligence in content assessment at the start of a project does not only have negative implications for business but it might also result in very dire repercussions for the company’s finances.

Website content inventories and audits may be standard in most cases, but it is a bit tricky to work with information that someone else has generated. It is therefore advisable to carry out a content audit which will let you think for yourself and get a chance to customize the work to fit your needs; decide what should stay and what to direct to the recycle bin. You risk having critical content left out if you outsource this service to a different person because some content might only require some basic rewriting and not complete deletion,

Design Vs. Content

Understanding your content is very powerful. When working on a new website design, it is important to sufficiently consider the format and volume of content. If you have a template, they must be friendly to the content you currently have if you are to effectively fill in the content from the existing website. Sometimes, you may have to increase or reduce the number of pages, but such expectations have to be realistic in every sense. For example, you cannot be asked to compress 500 pages into a 100 page design. The template has to be customized to accommodate the content if you are to conduct serious and flawless migration.

Sometimes, clients may assume that they have the right quality content, only for a content audit to reveal that whatever they thought was the best is actually not effective and doesn’t meet expectations. In such cases, you may have to rewrite or craft a fresh set of content for the web pages if you are to deliver quality work.

Just the same way a professional doctor will not proceed to diagnosis without properly examining the patient, a content strategists should conduct due diligence to design an informed content strategy. Migration is a multi-disciplinary affair and you risk washing away many hours of serious work if you don’t spend sufficient time planning and understanding your content. Since creation of content inventories and audits has been simplified with the aid of website content analysis tools, there is no excuse why anyone shouldn’t understand a website’s content and how it relates to the overall goals and objectives. 

Additional Resources:

How to Conduct A Content Audit, Donna Spencer

How To Do a Content Audit - Step-by-Step, Everett Sizemore

Who within your organization or your client’s organization should be tasked with auditing your website content? Anyone with basics on content creation, organization and display can carry out a website content audit and the findings should be shared with all personnel and departments in the organization.

The main aim of a content audit is not only to simply collect data but also have the information you need to make informed decisions.  An individual can conduct a content audit and the process improved through the formation of a multi-disciplinary team.  All the experts involved in content audit gain greater insight into the site’s content by breaking down the audit process in respect to areas of expertise and using the services of a team who understand the technology, systems and standards involved in the content lifecycle of your website.

Content Strategists And Marketers

Members of the content team that is comprised of content marketers, content strategists and content writers are the owners of the content audit process and yields of undertaking content inventories and audits.  These processes are conducted, as they constitute very important strategy creation pieces. Audits provide the base for the current state of the content, help in identifying areas of low quality or poorly performing content, and allow for the creation of a gap analysis as well as the roadmap of how to get from where the site is to where you want it to be.

Information Architects and User Experience Designers

The insights got from undertaking an inventory and audit are also important and useful to information architects and user experience designers. Developing the designs of navigation systems, user flows, and taxonomies without the benefit of a thorough understanding of the existing content can give rise to designs that do not sufficiently support user needs or behave desirably in multi-channel and multi-device environments.

At some point, you may find yourself having to deal with undesired content lurking in the background of your website’s neat surface. This is because chances are that there will be content in your website that you have never thought about and consequently not developed any designs for. Such content has to go somewhere and in most cases, it becomes shoehorned into a website layout that it was not meant to occupy or even migrate to an outdated website with an unfriendly design.

Content Managers and Developers

For the site managers and technical teams that are planning to have a content migration, it is important to understand the type of content that exists, the amount of content present, and the changes that it might undergo when moving from one system to another. A content audit done before a website migration should be inclusive of a keep/kill pass, for purposes of ensuring that only the content fit for migration is migrated.  It should also take into consideration the content issues that can be fixed as part of or in advance of the actual migration such as coding issues that have an effect on rendering or non-consistent structure that will be difficult to migrate cleanly. Audit findings affect the design and production of features within the CMS, such as the content tree structure, the content input and rendering structures, and the taxonomy & tagging features.

Sharing your audit findings with the technical team as well as pairing with your UX counterparts for purposes of ensuring that the new CMS or site structure is configured properly for your content will save you unnecessary troubles and challenges during migration of content.

Business Stakeholders

Most likely, if you are undertaking a site audit, you are doing it for purposes of a larger business goal: a planned site migration, there are new business ventures related to the site, or there is a general need to give the site a good makeover.  Your audit should play a vital role in informing your stakeholders on which side of the house they are on, whether on the business side or on the technical side.

Customers

Though it may seem uncommon for customers to be site auditors, it is worth noting that they already are. Everytime a customer browses your website whether when buying a product or just browsing product, they are developing an opinion about the site. You should watch your website analytics to see the length of time they spend on your website, whether they come back later, or where and when they leave your site. These are valuable hints to the performance of your content.

Your site’s search log will provide you with first hand information on whether they are using the same language used in your website and if they are able to find what they are looking for. If you fail to pay attention to this data, then you may be missing priceless opportunities for your website.  If your visitors leaves comments on your content, share the comments and address the concerns they raise about the user experience of your site. Your customers and site visitors are the most valuable and honest site auditors as they audit your site as it is, with no bias whatsoever.

Additional Resources:

How To Do a Content Audit - Step-by-Step, Everett Sizemore

How To Conduct A Content Audit, Rebecca Lieb

Website design and redesign is a costly process. Content creation and management is equally time-consuming and expensive but very vital to the life of any online business. To better understand your content and how it connects with the customers and users, you need to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze your content. To do this, you need to use a content inventory which is a comprehensive list of files organized in a spreadsheet or software that you can use to plan the content of a new site or improve on an existing one.

During website redesign and migration, the content inventory accumulates more information to the initial list of files. The content manager can include more columns of data such as assigning ownership of each content on the website, review status, important notes for migration, URLs, metadata plus many more as needed. The organization of the spreadsheet is based on the site’s structure for easy deriving of the navigational model. You can also use the inventory for tracking content on different systems. Furthermore, it can even double up as the copy deck for guiding how each page is rebuild. By the end of the project this document is normally filled with lots of comprehensive information on the website’s content structure.

Why Create a Content Inventory?

There are many reasons why creating a content inventory is very important. Here are some of the reasons;

• Use it as a foundation for tracking website migration
• Offers basis for project estimation
• Measures the website’s landscape as it is
• Helps in the identifications of content structure
• Offer a baseline of comparision

When Should You Inventory?

There is no specific time when you should create an inventory. However, the following are the three most common and important times to inventory;

• During regular ongoing website maintenance
• At the beginning of a website redesign
• When preparing for a CMS migration
• After a CMS migration

Most people don’t like working with content inventories for various reasons. First, creating a comprehensive inventory is time-consuming. Second, they can quickly become outdated if you frequently update the site. Finally, content inventories are not easy to maintain and when they are customized, they are not easy to update.

The solution to the problem above lies in the use of automatic content analysis tool like DYNO Mapper. This application makes it possible for content managers and strategists to quickly and reliably create wide-ranging inventories offering rich data about every page, including inbound and outbound links, quantity and nature of images, videos, downloads and documents on each page. You also get to review metadata such as page descriptions and titles. You can keep the inventory updated by being able to locate new, deleted or altered files, which is important for maintaining superior quality content on the site.

Additional Resources:

The Rolling Content Inventory, Lou Rosenfeld

How to Create a Content Strategy, Ian Lurie

The Long Happy Life of a Content Inventory, Paula Land

Taking a Content Inventory, Donna Maurer

Taking a Content Inventory, Janice Crotty Fraser

Content Inventories, Audits, and Analyses: All part of benchmarking, Rahel Anne Bailie

The Content Inventory is Your Friend, Kristina Halvorson

Building the Mother of All Content Inventories, Sue Davis

The content inventory, Rahel Anne Bailie