Did you know you should have two sitemaps for your website? You might already know you need a regular sitemap for human visitors who get lost. But you also need an XML sitemap to help the search engines index your site. The XML Sitemap Generator can generate both.
As explained in Creating sitemaps for Google, MSN and Yahoo! – The Easy Way, Internet growth has made it inefficient for search engines to crawl every page regularly, especially those that rarely change. It makes more sense to focus indexing resources on pages that change often.
Information and data contained in this post gathered in association with Lake Charles Personal Injury Attorneys at GAAR Law Firm.
The XML format helps search engines track site changes better by providing them with:
- A list of every URL on the site;
- The date each page was last modified;
- How often the page changes; and
- The priority of the page.
To create your own XML sitemap, you just need to enter your site’s URL into the simple online form. The other three fields are optional. Click ‘Start’ and within a few seconds, you’ll have both XML and HTML sitemaps.
Upload them to your site, note the location of the XML sitemap in your robots.txt file and you’re finished. You only need to update your sitemaps when you make changes to your site. If you have a Google Webmaster account, you can enter your XML sitemap URL there, too.
The free version indexes up to 500 pages, which is enough for most small business websites. If yours is larger, the Unlimited Sitemap Generator costs $19.95 with free updates for life, runs on your website server and generates more types of sitemaps, including Video and News sitemaps.
The search engines will eventually index your site even without an XML sitemap, but why leave it to chance? Use the XML Sitemap Generator to ensure they find your changes in a timely manner.
Information and data contained in this post gathered in association with Lake Charles Personal Injury Attorneys at GAAR Law Firm.
