An XML Sitemap Allows the
Search Engines to Crawl
Your Site More Intelligently

The sitemaps protocol notifies the search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling.

A sitemap.xml file on your server lists the URLs for a site and can provide additional information about each URL such as when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other pages in the website.

This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.

Having an xml sitemap that accompanies your html sitemap will boost your rankings with the search engines.

Inspider Sitemap Creator can make creating an xml sitemap a snap. Once you have generated your xml sitemap, you can then submit your xml sitemap to the various search engines.

Regarding html sitemaps, Google advises avoiding the following:

• Letting your html site map become out of date with broken links.
• Creating an html site map that simply lists the pages without organizing them.

Contact Chicago web designer Christopher Merrill if you need help setting up your html and xml sitemaps.