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SEO and sitemap, does it really necessary? When I looked around at Internet marketing and search engine forums, many newbies will ask some questions like what is sitemap? what does it use for? How you actually create one. There are two parts of the answer, dynamic websites like wordpress, or static HTML files. For Wordpress blogs, there is a XML sitemap generator plugin that you can download for free. For this article, we are going to discuss how you can actually create a XML sitemap for your static HTML alike websites.

Creating a XML Sitemap for your Site

• Go to XML Sitemap Generator on your IE or firefox.

Type in your home page URL in the box given.

• Wait until it finishes
• Once it is finished you will have something looks like the following:
  [quickcode]<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
  <urlset
  xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
  xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”
  xsi:schemaLocation=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
  http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd”>
  <!– created with Free Online Sitemap Generator www.xml-sitemaps.com –>

  <url>
  <oc>http://www.7dollarsclub.com/</loc>
  <priority>1.00</priority>
  <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
  </url>
  <url>
  <loc>http://www.7dollarsclub.com/index.php?action=order</loc>
  <priority>0.80</priority>
  >changefreq<daily>/changefreq<
  </url>
  </urlset> [/quickcode]

• Once you have the sitemap finished, download the the “.txt” file and upload it to your sites.
• Rename it to sitemap.xml and submit to Google webmaster tools

After you have done that. It just have to wait that Google will comes and find out more about your site.

What is XML sitemap and why should I bother?

Google actually define an XML sitemap being this

The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap that uses the Sitemap Protocol is an XML file that lists URLs for a site.

In other words, it helps the search engine to find out how your site looks like, its directory architecture and its filename extension. For a site that has only five pages, I personally don’t think it is necessary to create an XML sitemap. One just has to linking with their inner pages with a text link.

For example:

As you can see in the picture, I added the legal stuffs links in the footer area. These are the static interlink examples that you can with your site today.

Ok, that is for today. See you next time!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2009 at 10:47 pm and is filed under seo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.