At its most basic an XML sitemap is what it sounds like – a map of your site. It tells search engines (and anyone viewing a sitemap) where to search, providing them URLs to follow. It lays out everything that is on your site in one easy to use place.
XML is a protocol that is used in many different arenas, including, but not limited to, the creation of sitemaps. It is not necessary to go into what XML is here here, just so long as you know that it is a specific protocol that is used for the creation of site maps.
If you know the protocols needed to create a sitemap than you could do it yourself, though it does take a fair amount of time. For those less technically minded, or anyone sensible enough to want to save some time, it is far better to use a tool like this one to create it. This gives you a fully accurate site map, created in seconds, with no coding needed by you what so ever.
Once you have created your sitemap you can the post it on your site to provide an ease of use for browsers. More importantly you can submit it to the search engines so that their 'spiders' can crawl your site and index all the pages.
The sitemap lays out every URL of pages on the website. This means that 'spiders' from search engines such as Google and Yahoo can browse all the pages of the site. This is important because some pages on the site may not be able to be browsed to by following links – which means that the search engines would otherwise not pick them up to be indexed.
The sitemap also shows the spiders where to look for flash content, content which search engines often otherwise skip over and fail to index.
So as you can see a sitemap is important for making sure that every page on your website gets fully indexed in the search engines – which means it can then be found by people who are searching the web for the sort of pages that you have written for your site.
And that's what a XML sitemap is, a way of making sure that people can find all the information on your site, that search engines and the people using them can always find the pages that you have created.
Make sure that you create an XML sitemap for your own site if you want to ensure that you get the maximum possible amount of people visiting your site.
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