Boost your visibility and SEO through proper Sitemap use

There are many ways to build a sitemap.xml file for your website. Below are just a few.

Manual Process for Building a Sitemap to Boost SEO and Increase Spider Access:

You can create a sitemap html doc in any text editor. A smattering of XML knowledge is all that is required. Oh and some patience and the ability to cut and paste.

Open a new document in a text editor. (Notepad work great for this) otherwise if your use Word, WordPad, WordPerfect or some other advanced editor you must make sure to save in a text format. Note: Do not save as html, Word and other Editors will add a bunch of unneeded information that will render the sitemap worthless. Save as Text, then change the file extension from txt to html or htm depending on your host.

Copy the following and paste into your new document:

Leave the first two lines and the very last line alone.

               http://www.yoursite.com/

               2009-01-01

               monthly

               http://www.yoursite.com/nextpage.html

               2009-01-01

               monthly

0.5

You are concerned with the items within the and tags. You will need these elements for every page you want to report to the Search engines. We have started with 2 (two). Find the line that shows “http://www.yoursite.com/” and edit to put the URL to your website.
Change the tag as required (today’s date might be a good place to start) More information on
Edit the to the value closest to value. Monthly is good even if you do not change that often. More information on
Edit the tag. Remember .1 for disclaimers and legal stuff and 1.0 for main page, .08 for primary pages works well and general stuff around .5 should do the trick.
Move down to the next set and repeat steps 4 through 7.
Highlight and copy the complete set and paste as often as required to finish off the rest of your pages.
When you are done, upload to the home or root directory of your website and name it sitemap.htm or sitemap.html

This method works well for small sites, but can get quite confusing and or tedious for large sites.

Automating the Process for Building the Sitemap.xml to boost SEO and Increase Spider Access:

Automated Site Map Tools:

Sometimes your web hosting provider, especially if you are using a Content Management System (CMS) like DotNetNuke, Joomla, etc. has the ability to auto create this file for you. Check with them.

Otherwise there are sites and programs that can do it for you. Some are easy, some free, some are limited and some are quite powerful. Some require you to do the work each time there are changes, others can be set to create the latest on the fly.

www.xml-sitemaps.com

This site offers free xml generation for up to 500 page sites, you have to download file when it is done and then upload to your home directory of your site. A paid product can be purchased and installed on your site that can perform this duty automatically in the future. Full Evaluation of the tool can be found in the Tools Section.

Nitty Gritty of A Google Sitemap XML File:

Element	Optional	Description
	No	The loc is the only required element. The information provides the full URL of the page being documented., You must include the protocol (e.g. http, https) and a trailing slash, if required by the site's hosting server. This value must be less than 2,048 characters. For example: http://www.ucanseo.com/ “the trailing slash is not required by my host, but since it does not hurt anything for future compatibility we have added it.
	Yes	The optional lastmod element contains the date that the file was last modified. Use the date format YYYY-MM-DDThh:mmTZD, where the day and time value are optional. www.w3.org defines the format as follows: YYYY = four-digit year MM = two-digit month (01=January, etc.) DD = two-digit day of month (01 through 31) hh = two digits of hour (00 through 23) (am/pm NOT allowed) mm = two digits of minute (00 through 59) ss = two digits of second (00 through 59) s = one or more digits representing a decimal fraction of a second TZD = time zone designator (Z or +hh:mm or -hh:mm) This profile defines two ways of handling time zone offsets: Times are expressed in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), with a special UTC designator ("Z"). Times are expressed in local time, together with a time zone offset in hours and minutes. A time zone offset of "+hh:mm" indicates that the date/time uses a local time zone which is "hh" hours and "mm" minutes ahead of UTC. A time zone offset of "-hh:mm" indicates that the date/time uses a local time zone which is "hh" hours and "mm" minutes behind UTC. For Example: For December 28, 2009, 10:01:32 Eastern Standard Time would be 2009-12-28T10:01:32-5 The Bold item above is the minimum information needed.
	Yes	The optional changefreq element tells how often the content on the page changes. Note: This is only a recommendation or guide for the spiders and bots. It is not used to set how frequently pages are actually crawled or indexed. Pages set never may still be re-indexed and pages marked hourly may go weeks or months. Setting inaccurately to hourly will probably have no real or lasting effect and may actually negatively effect re-spider rate. Values for the frequency the page may change: always (documents that always change) hourly daily weekly monthly yearly never (documents that never change, like archives)
	Yes	Direct Quote from Google “Setting the priority of pages will never affect your site's ranking” But also from Google “Search engines use this information when selecting between URLs on the same site, so you can use this tag to increase the likelihood that your more important pages are present in a search index.” The optional priority tag describes the relative priority of this page to all the other pages on your site. Acceptable priority values range from 1.0 or extremely important to 0.1 not important at all. Your Sitemap should accurately indicate the relative priority of pages on your site. For example, the home page is most likely extremely important and should be ranked a full 1.0, while you can set the priority of other pages, such as disclaimers and legal information, lower still at say .1. Somewhere in between fall all the rest. .5 is listed in the Sitemap specification as the default. Google further states “The priority value has no effect on your pages compared to pages on other sites. Because this value is relative to other pages on your site, and not to other pages on the web in general, assigning a high priority to all of the URLs on your site will not help your site's search ranking. In addition, setting all pages to the same priority will have no effect. “ This means don’t make them all 1.0 or all .5 change it up in a logical manner.

What is a Sitemap?:

Do I already Have A Sitemap?:

Will a Sitemap Help My SEO?:

What Does A sitemap.xml File Look Like?: