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You want search engines to know about all of your website's
pages, and you can facilitate this discovery process by creating
a sitemap.
A sitemap is a list of your website's pages. A sitemap is
a web page itself but not always a traditional web page. Traditional
web pages are typically in the html or htm format, but a sitemap
can be in an xml, xhtml, or even txt format.
There are websites and programs out there that will create
sitemaps for you automatically, so don't waste your time doing
all of this yourself. One website that's particularly easy
and user-friendly is http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.
Whatever format a sitemap is in, it's simply a list of all
the pages that make up a website, and it's a tool that makes
it easy for search engines to quickly find out the names and
locations of all the pages contained in a website. You put
the sitemap file in the root of your site--the same place
where your index file is kept.
When I create a sitemap, I create three different versions--an
xml version, a txt version, and an htm (or html) version.
The xml and txt versions are basically bare-bones lists of
the pages making up my website for the internet crawlers--those
"spiders" that creep around and discover all the
files out there on the world wide web. The htm (or html) file
is for visitors to my website. I dress this one up a bit to
match the look of the rest of my website.
Google's spiders like xml sitemaps. I'm not sure which search
engines prefer txt sitemaps, but by uploading htm, xml, and
txt sitemaps, your bases should be covered.
Put all three of these files in the root folder of your website
(the same place the index file is). Make a link to the html
version at the bottom of your homepage. You do not need to
make links to the other sitemap files.
When your site is "crawled," the spiders will now
be able to easily discover all of the pages you've created.
Soon enough, Google and Yahoo will know about all of the content
available at your website address.
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