It's one thing to have a site map on your Web site, and it's another to have an XML sitemap for search engines.
The XML sitemap protocol is supported by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! as a way of submitting Web pages to search engines. With an XML sitemap, you can tell the engines additional information about your Web pages, like how often they're updated and how important they are relative to other documents on the site.
A very informative post, off now to try and add a XML sitemap to my website.
Google provides a nice tool to get started. It can create a sitemap for you based on “URL lists, web server directories, or from access logs.” I’ve used this once on a site and had it generate based on the apache access logs. It works pretty well but it can also give away areas you may want hidden. I’m not sure if google hides a listing in the sitemaps that is “protected” by robots.txt.
Thank you for this article. I have always wanted to know how to make a site map, but when I searched for information on how to do it, all I got was lists of programs that would automatically build a site map for me. Now I can do it myself!
Thanks Ryan, I was just coming in to add in here that if you use Google Sitemaps you don’t have to build the sitemap from scratch. I included how to do it via XML so that people who don’t want to use Google Sitemaps or can’t use it are not left out.
And as you mentioned, if you control the XML yourself (rather than using the Google tool) you control what goes in it. That doesn’t mean that search engines won’t find hidden areas, but there will be a lower probability.