Sitemap in SEO Training

Sitemap is a file which provides links information embedded in the website. It contains links of all pages. Search Engine crawler look in to this file to scroll all pages inside your website.

The sitemap file is of two types.

1. .txt file
2. .xml file

.txt file is a simple notepad file. Webmaster paste all links of the site in this file one in each line and save this file as text file.

.xml file is a file with all links of the website along with different parameters to set priority of a specific page and change frequency of the page. Change frequency means how often the page will be updated.
This helps the crawler to understand the attributes of page and its a search engine friendly activity to save time of crawler.

A simple example is shown below:

<url>

  <loc>http://iqaisarseo.blogspot.com/</loc>

  <lastmod>2011-01-25T10:53:00+00:00</lastmod>

  <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url> 

The change frequency can be set as once, daily, weekly, monthly etc. "lastmod" means last modification date and time. Add this information with every link of your website in sitemap.xml file.

Webmaster make the sitemap file with either .txt or .xml extension and upload it through his ftp account in his website. This page is not displayed for visitors. (example: sitemap.txt or sitemap.xml

Sitemap file is done during on page optimization.

For blogspot website sitemap submission is a bit complicated process in google webmaster tool which is made easy here

One can generate his sitemap.xml file through internet by hundreds of free sitemap.xml generating websites. Its easy to use !!!