Sitemaps

About Sitemaps

I recently read a bit about sitemaps well all so good, but is there a good site out there which allow scanning more then 500 for free? Or is it better to include links manually

I've done the same.

In the end I decided to investigate what a sitemap really was. Do I need hundreds of pages in a sitemap? The answer for me was "No".

sitemap Now before i get told off for being wrong, I really have no idea if right or wrong. I just know the free generators, only gave 500 or so, and boy, was some of it crap I didn't need or want generated. I do know that search engines have found me, and crawl my arcade/forum every day. Once they are crawling they seem to follow links everywhere on my site. If I have a page it is crawled. Why? Because if it can be followed from my menu I suspect they find it.

And this is where we come to what is a sitemap?

Well basicly a sitemap is a way for you, the webmaster, to inform search engines about pages on your sites that are available for crawling.

A sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

So.. in my book it is a menu with a little more information. Search engines come along and goes "ohh look, a sitemap. Lets follow that" In that sitemap you have every section of your website, effectively a more indepth menu.

So, if you have a Rss feed editor, make a sitemap.xml with links to everywhere you want a crawler to go. If you add a new catagory for instance add it to your sitemap.xml.

My site is based on a forum, but my sitemap has a link in it to the arcade, forum and everthing else. If the search crawler goes into the forum it will definatly find every post in every catagory, regardless. Thats what they do.

Then they come out of the forum and look at the sitemap and find a link to arcade. From there they find 1000 or so games and high scores and comments and so forth. On and On...

The sitemaps job was to send them to the forum.

If you have a Google account, don't forget to login and use webmaster tools and tell them your sitemap..Google goes straight to it(and if Google does..well...). There is also a webmaster tool for automatic sitemap generation, but I never understood it enough to impliment it.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html http://www.google.com/sitemap.html
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Then there is the Visual sitemap page for real people. I used to have one in my arcade but lost it in a server crash and never got around to making a new page. Add it to the sitemap xml and things will be found.

It is also about looking very like a professional webmaster, more information is what the internet is used for. A visual sitemap helps visitors to your website find what they are looking for..faster. You have 3-4 seconds to get visitors interested enough to look for what they want. A visual one will list everything you have and hopefully, exactly what they want is right there to help them stay. A good simple example of a visual sitemap is here>> http://www.smilecity.co.nz/page.asp?go=map&u=&c= if you can access that page.

In conclusion, a sitemap is exactly what it is. Thats probably why it is called a sitemap.