A sitemap traditionally is a tree like structure that will show the user a view of the entire site (or some parts of the site if the site is very large). The tree like structure usually has clickable links, a good example of this would be the main sitemap of this site (www.BuildWebsite.com/sitemap.html), or the one on BlueGrind's site (http://www.BlueGrind.com/site_map.html) which shows an alternate method because it is a much larger site with many pages.

However, the Sitemap that I am talking about is not this traditional sitemap, it is a sitemap that, funny enough, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft came together and established as a standard for search engines. The official  site is called www.sitemaps.org , and it has the instructions that you can follow to manually make these files. But they are mainly meant to give the programmer the XML schema (the XML structure) that he/she will need to make a program that can output the information, which changes often.

 Here is the structure we follow in making ours at http://www.BuildWebsite.com:

The structure is simple, really. Here are the explanations of the tags

Of course the top part (<?xml and the <urlset xmlns lines) you can just copy and paste.

<url> - Just means that this is a new URL, you have to have this for each and every page that you want the search engine to know about, and it has to end with a </url> after the rest of the tags, which I will explain below. So this means all the tags below will need to be between the <url> and the </url> tags.

<loc> - is the "Location" or the webpage that you want the search engine to look at. Of course just as any other tag, it needs to be closed with the slashed tag like so, </loc>. It will be the full URL of the page including the http:// part of the URL.

<priority> - This is an optional tag and the number can be 0.0 to 1.0, it is really meant to tell the search engine which pages you feel are more important than others. Of course the higher the number (1.0 being highest) the more important the page. Default is 0.5, but you should vary this amongst your pages so the search engine gives them more priority (only against your own pages, not against others') when it shows the pages. For example, if you sell shoes, and you have a page that talks about shoe polish, then when someone searches for shoe and gets all your pages in the list, you want them to get the 1.0 priority pages before the 0.5 priority pages. Close this tag with a </priority> tag.

<lastmod> - When was the page last Modified. This is important, because if the search engine has already indexed this page, then it will skip it, but if you put the last modified date, then it will know that it has to do it over again because it has changed since the last index. The format is like this: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+/-HH:MM (The +HH:MM or  -HH:MM is the time offset from GMT) and of course this tag also needs </lastmod> to close.

<changefreq> - This of course is very important. DON'T PUT DAILY OR HOURLY IF IT DOESN'T CHANGE DAILY OR HOURLY!!! With most people the tendency is to put "Daily" or "Hourly" so the search engine comes back. But the fact of the matter is, if it comes back a few times and compares the page, and sees that there has been no change, it might completely ignore it on the next visits. BE TRUTHFUL, with search engines it goes a long way. Don't forget to close the tag with </changefreq> tag. 

Keep in mind that search engines want your content indexed, but they want it indexed within the right context and the right area. Don't just opt for being listed, it will not last if it is not properly listed. You have to work on making changes in your site, it makes it more interesting for repeat visitors also.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an art that is learned. If you read and isten to articles (such as this one and the http://www.BlueGrind.com/seosecrets.html) by people that have been there and done that, then you can streamline the process and learn how to design and write properly in the first place. What seems interesting to you, will be interesting to a lot of other people on the web. If you like the way a site is structured, maybe you can learn from it.

If you want to use a program to do this, you can use the program at http://gsitecrawler.com/en/download which is a program you download and install on your local computer. It basically works like a search engine, it crawls the site and looks at what pages there are and makes the sitemap file for you. There are many other ones, but this is one of the cleanest ones I have tried.

This article was created and is the copyright of Diran Afarian. It can only be used by permission. Diran can be reached by clicking on the feedback form on the www.BlueGrind.com website.