create xml site map for website

XML site-maps are collection of links with their respective attributes formatted according to XML schema. XML site-maps are created for web spiders. After creating a site map you must save the XML file with UTF-8 encoding.

XML site map format:

                 <?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">

              <url>

                  <loc>http://mydomain.com/</loc>

                  <lastmod>2010-01-01</lastmod>

                  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>

                   <priority>0.5</priority>

             </url>

           </urlset>

Each link saved in the site map have four attributes -:

loc -: This is the first and mandatory attribute.The Loc attributes represents the original url link. All url tags must use entity escape codes for certain characters .Following is the table for entity escape code:

Character	Escape Code
Ampersand (&)	&
Double Quote (“)	"
Single Quote (')	'
Greater Than (>)	>
Less Than (<)	&lt;

lastmod:- This is the second attributes and a optional one. As the name suggests that this attribute show when this link modified last. This attribute is optional but offers strong benefit it can be used as a signal to crawler that this page may be needed to crawled again .

Changefreq:- This is a optional attribute and tells how the frequently pages can be changed.

Priority:- This attribute is most important among all optional attributes .This attribute tells how important the page is.Its vales ranges from 0.0 to 1.0 .The default value for the page is 0.5. Higher priority increase the chances of getting crawled.

Reasons for using XML site-maps is that it promote quick crawling and indexing of your site.Now site-maps are discovered in Robot.txt files.Multiple XML site-maps can be used for large sites instead of using a large sites-maps . The xml site-maps can have no more than 50000 links in case of bigger website than this limit it id good to use multiple site-maps. Site-maps for small sites can be created manualy , but for very large site many online tools are available.

XML sites-map submission:-

• By using Webmster tools
• By using Ping method:- for example

Google

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www. mydomain.com/sitemap.xml