Having XML sitemaps on your website can be very beneficial when it comes to the search engine optimisation stage of the site. Most of the biggest search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo! all use XML sitemaps in their web crawlers/bots. If a website has an XML sitemap, it is much easier for the search engines to judge which pages have a higher priority, it can also provide information to the search engines’ crawler on how old the page is and how frequently it is updated. This information will help search engines associate the sites pages with the pages keywords. This saves the search engines crawler a lot of time, as it means the crawler has no need to go searching all the links on each page to find out the information for them pages, as the sitemap provides that information for it.

XML sitemaps can also be useful for pages that the web crawler cannot see, this may include pages with just pictures on, or pages which contain minimal content, but is vital to your website/services. The crawlers may not be able to see your pages when you have dynamic URLs. Don’t let this put you off though as there are ways to change the URLs as there are ways to create dynamic XML sitemaps that will change as your website changes.

Using dynamic xml sitemaps can be very useful if you use tools like a content management system (CMS) which allow you edit pages and other content on your website. As this can automatically update every time the search engines crawler reads the file. Meaning any new pages or edits done to current pages can be logged in an up to date sitemap file. A dynamic XML sitemap might also be useful when using software on your website that offer functionality, for example; some shopping scripts may already have the xml sitemaps functionality built in, so updates are made as you add or edit products to your shop.

I hope this article is found to be useful, as XML sitemaps can be a vital part of the search engine optimisation stage of any website. It may even help you market pages that web crawlers would not normally find.

XML site maps are a simple way of allowing search engine spiders to easily and quickly navigate their way around a website. The site map includes meta tags, such as- how often the web page is updated, when it changes, descriptions of the content and how relative the page is in relation to other URLs. This is all done so the search engines can crawl and index the the web page quicker and more efficiently.

A webmaster can create a Site map, documenting every accessible URL within the website, they can then submit the site map to the search engines. Now that Google, Yahoo! and MSN all use the same protocol, by having a site map it allows the most popular search engines to crawl and index the web pages information. XML site maps work with the robots.txt file, by similarly allowing search engines to crawl certain pages of a website and to view certain URLs.

Within these XML site maps, there are some tags that must be included within the data, these are as following:

• Must start with opening tag <urlset> and end with closing tag </urlset>.
• The name space must be specified within the <urlset> tag.
• You must include the <url> tag for every URL, this is like a parent XML tag.
• For every parent tag, you must include the <loc> child entry.

However, not all tags are compulsory, some other tags are optional. Each search engine has different tolerances and support schemes for the optional tags. The search engines heavily document where their stance is regarding XML site maps and tags.

Although the XML site maps do not guarantee, that your web page will be ranked within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), it provides a nudge in the right direction for the search engine spiders to crawl your site more effectively. XML site maps are an important way of helping search engines to quickly and efficiently crawl and index your website.