Web based software that will automatically crawl your site and build a sitemap of your entire site, or of the pages that you allow. The sitemap generated has various uses. You can submit the sitemap to Google or yahoo to help get your site indexed better. You can provide your visitors with a sitemap of your site. You can use the generated maps as a report to help you see the page titles and meta descriptions of your pages. As a side bonus there is the broken links report which will help you easily track down broken links on your site. In a nutshell XML-Sitemaps is a SEO tool!
What is Google Sitemaps?
Google Sitemaps is a free service offered by Google that allows you to submit an xml file of all the pages on your site to Google. Google will use this xml file to gain more knowledge of the structure of your web site as well as all the pages. According to Google, submitting a sitemap to their system will help your site get indexed better. This is taken from their help section "Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages."
Of course there are no guarantees that using a sitemap that your pages will get indexed by Google as is stated in the Google help section: "Sitemaps provide additional information about your site to Google, complementing our normal methods of crawling the web. We expect they will help us crawl more of your site and in a more timely fashion, but we can't guarantee that URLs from your Sitemap will be added to the Google index. Sites are never penalized for submitting Sitemaps."
What ever it is we are to expect from Google Sitemaps, one thing is for sure, it can't hurt you to submit a sitemap to Google it can only help you.
In steps XML-Sitemaps
Now that you understand what is Google Sitemaps and can see the potential benefits, you are probably wondering, how do I get a map of my site? One way is by using XML-Sitemaps. XML-Sitemaps will generate an xml sitemap of your site for use with Google. Click here to go to xml-sitemaps.com.
XML-Sitemaps doesn't just stop there
Several Ways to Promote
The nice thing about this simple software called XML-Sitemaps is that it does a little bit more than just create a map of your site for submission to Google. It will also create:
A text map of your site for submission to yahoo.com
A customizable html sitemap for use for the visitors to your own web site,
An ror.xml feed, which apparently is more flexible than Google Sitemap's xml feeds in that "ROR feeds can be easily accessed by all search engines".
And even Google Base format
Does other things too
XML-Sitemaps generates a list of all broken links on your site, weather your site is static or dynamic. No need to purchase additional software, no need to run a program on your windows machine and have it scan the remote server. Now you can spend less time digging through your server log files looking for those 404 errors and trying to track down the missing pages or broken links. Just visit the Broken Links tab of XML-Sitemaps and you can see a list of all 404 errors and which page on your site they were referred from.
XML-Sitemaps can generate an html sitemap of your pages. This is useful for helping visitors find content on your site, but it also serves another purpose in that it gives you a nice visual of all the page titles you are using on your site. When you see that page title "Untitled Document" or when you see those 100 pages that all have the same name, you will find this tool invaluable to helping you get your pages SEO ready. If you have the server resources or have a small enough site, you can also have the meta descriptions show up on your sitemap. useful to give your clients more information, or again to help in getting your pages SEO ready.
Automation is Included
No need to fuss with constantly generating a map of your site. Just setup a cron job on the server and add the XML-Sitemaps generator to it and you can have your sitemap generated as often or as little as you like. Then if that isn't enough you can also tell XML-Sitemaps to notify Google of when your sitemap is ready.
Many Other Features...
Among the list of features I highlighted above, there are also several configuration features such as the inclusion and exclusion of directories and files by file name or file extension, the ability to set a priority level per page, the ability to compress your sitemap making it smaller, the ability to span multiple sitemaps to satisfy the 50,000 entries limitation imposed by Google and more. Check out XML-Sitemaps to get the full feature listing.
A Free Version and an Unlimited Version
Before I go I will offer a quick birds eye view of the difference between these two. If you have a small site, 500 pages or less and only want to take advantage of getting your sitemap generated in the various supported formats, then the free version might just be for you. However if you have a large site with more than 500 pages or you want to take advantage of the other features of XML-Sitemaps then you will need the Unlimited Version. Check it out now!
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