Web Skill Junction

Every website is flanked with several buttons and dazzling menu items to ease the navigation of the visitors. Primarily these items embed hyperlinks to drive the visitors to the concerned pages of their interest. In most of the cases even search engines follow these directions until they are obscured deliberately or unconsciously.

A sitemap in any website maps the complete site and helps both the visitors and search engines to find out the pages of their interest at one go.

A properly built sitemap clearly states name, short description and the corresponding URLs of each page and the hierarchical structure depicts the navigation truly for the entire website.

It is to be noted that if your domain has got several sub-domains, then each sub-domain should have separate sitemaps. A common sitemap placed in the root will dilute the importance of sub-domains.

The reality is the crawlers and spiders prefer to visit the sitemap file and navigate the site accordingly, thus necessitating the sitemap file to be placed at the root. Every entry in the sitemap should have the creation and the last modification date which enables the search engines to impede on a complete fresh crawling or a partial crawling, as the case may be.

This is also to be mentioned that search engines prefer a sitemap in xml format and it is least mentionable that you will find plenty of sitemap generators on the Internet, who will develop customized sitemap as per your need and as per data provided by you. Once you develop the sitemap by using a tool, you can edit/ add/ delete just by simply using any text editor of your choice.

Never forget that sitemap needs to be updated with each instance of update/ delete/ addition, precisely every activity in the website must be reflected in the sitemap.

A note of caution: Preference of sitemap format varies widely even among renowned search engines like Google, Yahoo!