Website Sitemap Use and its Format

Sitemap is map of your website/blog. This will help user understand your site without visiting each of your web pages. Online users spent very little time understanding your site. If they do not found the information they want, they will quickly move out from your site.

Seeing your sitemap, user can understand what your is site meant for! What kind of business you do and what kind of possible information can be available on the website. Sitemap give them organized view of your website. It will also help you in organizing your site latter when you create a new page or section.

Sitemap can be helpful in indexing your site by search engine as well. Many of your pages can contain flash,image or JavaScript content which cannot be correctly understand by search bot. Here also sitemap can be very useful.

SiteMap Format:

Essentials of Sitemap:
Use <urlset> tag as root tag,
Mention namespace within the urlset tag,
Use of <url> as parent tag of <loc> tag,
Use <log> child tag in <url> tag.

So, minimum of the SiteMap:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.satya61229.blogspot.com/</loc>
   </url>
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.satya-weblog.com/2008/10/web-browser-speed-comparison.html</loc>
   </url>
</urlset>

With the above must have sitemap tags, some more optional tags are available for use in sitemap:
<lastmod>, <changefreq>, <priority>.
<lastmod> tag will tell when you have last modified the page.
<changefreq> tag will help to guess the search engine when they need to crawl the page. It is simply a hint only.
Possible values of <changefreq> are: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never.
<priority> tag help of assign weightage to your pages on your website. This priority is a relative number (importance) you assign to your page compared to other pages on the same site only. Default is 0.5.