Site Maps, Like Navigation for Spiders
Speaking from an SEO perspective, smaps, both on-page and XML, are absolutely necessary (apart from other SEO basics). These help search engine spiders, or web crawlers, or bots, read the pages and links in your site, identify them, and proceed to associate your URLS with meta-data. In other words, site maps draw out a direction for how spiders can better crawl your site.
The on-page site-map is a page that basically lists or indexes all of the pages on your site. Even a human eye should be able to comprehend everything that exists on the website and be able to see how they are categorized.
The XML sitemap should be located in the root of your websites in order for all the pages in your website to be indexed. It should include the following:
1. A <urlset> tag that opens and closes with </urlset> tag
2. A <url> entry as a parent XML tag for each URL
3. A <url> parent tag tagged with <loc> for each child entry
Google adheres to the Sitemap Protocol 0.9, and your sitemap should dictate those rules. So any sitemap created for Google will then be compatible with other search engines that also abide by the same standards. Simplified, the XML should look something like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<url>
<loc>http://www.baytechwebs.com/</loc>
<priority>1.00</priority>
<lastmod>2009-07-15T20:18:39+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
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ABOUT BAYTECH WEB DESIGN
Baytech Digital is a global, full-service web development and internet marketing firm. Rated the number one web development firm of 2008 by the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Baytech Digital offers a full range of web services to entrepreneurs to enterprise level clients. As a winner of the Horizon Interactive Award, this dedicated team of professionals creates customer-focused web-based solutions that deliver tangible and measurable success.
