Sitemap How To

Something I have learned about releasing a new site is the importance of how to implement a bulletproof sitemap system, both html and xml. There’s 4 parts to this system, all different in their approach, but vital together as the complete package. For the sake of argument, let’s pretend this is a landscaping company website that sells lawn care products and does regular landscaping stuff and we need to get a good visitor and bot guidance system in place.

Part 1 - HTML Sitemap Optimizations
Example 1: Typical approach

Home
Products
Services
About Us
Contact
Legal


Now that’s exciting! Can ya feel the excitement? Let’s try this instead.

Example 2: Optimized Approach

Company Name <- (branding opportunity)
Lawn Care Products <-(Keywording opportunity)
» Tropical Plants <-(List your items, keworded of course)
» Gardening Tools
» Frilly Sun Hats
» Hi-Tech Watering Buckets
Landscaping Services <-(Landscaping is a keyword, use it! You could go as far as to include the name of the area you service)
» Lawn Mowing <-(list out your services, and keyword them up)
» Plant Sculpturing
» Irrigation
» Landscaping Consultation <-(Contact page, just dressed up now)
About Company Name
Contact Company Name
Legal Statement


It looks nicer now huh? This will serve to help your visitors to pinpoint their destination better, and you got some more keywords in for those pages you’re trying to rank for. Ok, so now onto the harder stuff.

Part 2 -XML Sitemap Optimizations
I know that there are a ton of online xml sitemap generators out there that can do the job for you, but don’t just settle for what those give you. Go ahead an use one, get the file and go in and edit it. For a small site like this, it would take about 5 minutes and it’s well worth it.

<loc>http://www.companyname.com/</loc>

<priority>1.0</priority>

<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

I’m not in the mood to put every single page in this mock XML sitemap, so use your imagination and pretend they’re all there.

Thanks, I appreciate it.

Anyways, what you want to do is focus on the priority tags and the changefreq tags. Your index, html sitemap, and whatever other pages you deem to be most important (whatever leads to your desired visitor action) and gets a 1.0 priority however the changefreq depends on whether the content is static or dynamic. Weekly is a safe bet starting out since you will be revising content on a weekly basis in an attempt to rank higher. Eventually monthly will work just fine.

Other pages are really up to you, but I would suggest starting out with a lower priority just to be nice to the bots and your hosting server.

Part 3 - META Tag Optimizations

I’m not going to talk about the description tag. I don’t even want to bother with the keywords tag. This is all about the robots tag. Very often this little guy is forgotten about and it’s a shame. When search engine spiders fail on reading your robots.txt file, or are not programmed to try and read that file, you always got one last chance with this tag. Go check out this explanation of how to use this META tag properly, and put it to use.

Part 4 - Tying It All Together on Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is your best friend. Treat it right, and in turn it will invite all of it’s cool search engine spider buddies over for a good time. Seriously though, this file is a powerful ally for getting indexed the right way and keeping some control of crawl rate, files and directories to exclude, site layout… well all kinds of good stuff.

What I want to focus on is how for once, many of the major search engines gave us a sign of hope by standardizing the use of your xml sitemap being mentioned in your robots.txt. Why is that good? Well you can now tell the search engines what pages you have and how to treat them. Oh, and don’t forget that your html sitemap is mentioned in your xml sitemap, so you just doubled the odds of your site being crawled and indexed further, if not completely.

Here’s how you do it;

User-agent: *
Allow:

Sitemap: http://www.companyname.com/sitemap.xml

That’s all there is to it! Just mention it as you see above. Simple huh? If you want to read further on this, check out sitemaps.org’s take on it.

Conclusion

Technically our system is 1 part for people and 3 parts for search engine spiders, but that’s ok. We’re working with the spiders more so they can bring more people to the site, so it only makes sense to approach it this way.  Personally, I have seen indexing happen sooner for me on brand new sites, as well as site remakes.

Hope this helps somebody out there, and if you got a suggestion, fire away in the comments below.

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