What Is An XML Sitemap?

An XML Sitemap is a sitemap purely for informing the search engines about the content on your site.

They are not the type of sitemap your websites visitors would find useful for finding content.

Instead of having nice looking, well categorized and laid out hyperlinks, an XML sitemap lists content by it’s URL in order of the date your content was added to your site or when your content was last edited.

Your XML sitemap provides information to the Search engines about the meta-data associated to the content on your site and it’s web-pages.

For example,

When the content was added to the site.
When your post or page was last edited.
and…
How often the content on the page is likely to be changed and updated.

The XML sitemap will also give the Search engines a good indication of the importance of certain pages on your site.

In a nut shell an XML sitemap informs the search engines on content added to your site and makes it easier for them to spider or crawl through your site indexing your content by it’s relevance and importance.

Having an XML sitemap however, doesn’t automatically mean that your web-pages are going to hit the number one spot in the search results.

There are way too many factors that come into play when it comes to where your content gets ranked, it just means that the search engines are aware of your content, and will display your content when the need and relevance arises.

The four major search engines that support the Sitemap protocol are…

Google.com.
Bing.com.
Yahoo.com.
and Ask.com.

Since the addition of XML sitemaps you no longer need to manually submit your site to the search engines, although when your first getting your site online, it is a good idea to submit your site to a feed aggregator to help your site initially get indexed.

If you are using Wordpress for your Content Management System, an XML Sitemap can be added to your site by simply installing and configuring a plugin.

Otherwise you can use the sitemap generation tool to Build your XML Site Map online.

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