Designing a Sitemap - XML and HTML
A sitemap is designed to tell the search engines about all the pages that are live on your website, which basically enables them to index the whole of your site. This important because you need all the major search engines to find the content on your site which reflects your key phrases and optimisation.
Google, Yahoo and MSN will look for a sitemap page on your web site to allow their robots to crawl your website efficiently, the other option is to ping your site map to search engines webmaster tools.My recommendation would be to have both.
XML Sitemap Generator
There are various website which can generate sitemap for you, I like to use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ ,it is a free and extremely easy to use automatic generator, You simply add your website URL address and follow the simple online instructions. It then generates a XML sitemap that you can download to your computer. Remember that the priorty of the files within your website suggests to the search engines how important this page is and how much it is related to your content and SEO.
HTML Sitemap Generator
You can quite easily generate a manual version of this and it basically lists the pages within your site, a good tip is maybe to aggregate your RSS news feed on this page using something like simlepie or Magpie. This will mean it will update automatically. You can also use the XML sitemap generator mentioned above to create a HTML sitemap, simply download and upload to your server. It is recommended that you call you HTML sitemap something relevent, such as sitemap.html, sitemap.php etc, which will allow the search engines robots to find it easily.
TOP TIP
Getting a site fully indexed is often overlooked in SEO, but it is recommended that you keep your sitemap as up to date as possible.
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