The growing importance of XML and HTML sitemaps

Creating Web pages is child's play. An enormous amount of time is spent in planning the look and feel of a web site before the development actually starts. From a user point of view, besides the site itself, the only tangible proof that the guarantees of this schedule are visible operational elements. In other words, the front-end elements which are linked to the functionality of the site. A sitemap is an element of the genre.

The name is self explanatory. But the simplicity of the site suggests that the map is misleading word. Sitemaps are complex, regardless of how the simple structure of the web page can be. Sitemaps can be created either in XML or HTML. These two types of sitemap are created for two purposes: XML: stretch for search engine spiders, and HTML sitemaps are meant for users. While there are people who think it's best to stick to only one or a HTML or XML sitemap, most people believe this is more beneficial for both. In general, sitemaps bring with it a sense that the site is organized, and it becomes easy for you to have an overhead view of your site. In addition, users also appreciate the preview of all that the site has to offer, rather than spending time discovering things click after click.

The HTML sitemap must represent the site in a very tangible. This has to be there as a link on the homepage of your website. The design elements used should reflect the overall tenor of the website. Unlike a sort of road map that has the primary objective of giving a clear and precise direction, a map of the site has the added responsibility of becoming a mirror for the rest of the site. The coding of the colors, styles, use of graphics, etc. are indicative of how one would expect the site to search. Users can make that connection between the appearance of the sitemap, and the look of the expected site. If the sitemap is drawn and colored, and the website is bland, a user feels deceived.

Sitemaps have a dual purpose - to make site navigation easier, help you to communicate with search engines. To achieve both these objectives, you must have both sitemaps for your website. XML sitemaps improve the search engine towards visibility, and are considered one of the best ways to optimize a site. Creating XML sitemap is a particularly easy to submit a site for search engines, where involving a new website, or if, for example, a website has recently added a bunch of new pages. Sitemaps are very important in sites that use a lot of menu created in Flash or JavaScript that do not have HTML links. Many websites today are mainly due the use of Flash. In fact, XML sitemaps are sent as a file to search engines. An XML sitemap is not really necessary if you already have all the pages indexed in Google. Where there are few pages which are not indexed, you must still create a sitemap for the whole site, and to give priority (using the priority tag) to those pages that have not been indexed. An XML sitemap, in this sense, is your way of telling the search engine as part of the page to be indexed.

Having a sitemap also means not relying entirely on external links that drive search engines to your website. This should definitely be avoided, but a map of the site would be a way to bypass a confused or faulty internal link structure that can mislead the search engines to orphan pages.

Generation of a sitemap is not a very complicated process. There are enough free places available tools that can do this for you. Alternatively, you can download the Google Sitemap Generator, and the execution of instructions. Needless to say that the second option is the hardest, but it also provides you with more control over the final result. Once you are done to generate a map of the site, using one of these methods is necessary to load on your website and tell Google about the same.

The growing importance of search engines means that it will soon become almost compulsory for websites to have sitemaps. As of now, Yahoo and MSN do not support sitemaps and ask webmasters to submit a reduced version of the sitemap that is, a text file that contains a list of all the url of the site. Although, given these sitemaps are becoming evident, there are good chances that this will change sooner or later. Sitemaps, indeed, soon became a rather simple and convenient way to submit your site to search engines .......