Probably one of the best actions that a web designer can take to improve the marketing performance of a web site and to ensure that site updates are quickly indexed by search engines is to install a sitemap.xml  on your web site and then register the site and sitemap with the major serach engine’s webmaster tools

Each page on a sitemap is time-stamped so the search engines can recognized an updated page and will understand that the page will need to be indexed.

“rhodeI have found the best tool to create sitemaps to be http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/  Free-of-charge and very quickly this site will produce the following files for you to install on your web site:

  • sitemap.xml
  • sitemap.html  (Depending on the client, sometimes I will link directly to this file or I will capture the code and integrate into my site template)
  • urllist.txt  (Very useful is you need a list of your site’s content)
  • ror.xml (Resources of a Resource, is a structured feedThis has three main benefits:
    1. It allows the spider to correctly categorize the content of the website into its engine.
    2. It allows the spider to extract very detailed information about the objects on a website (sitemaps, products, events, reviews, jobs, classifieds, etc.)
    3. It allows the website owner to optimize his site for inclusion of its content into the search engines.)

However, if you really want to improve your site’s visibility and reduce the amount of work needed to produce sitemap files then I highly recommend investing in the Unlimited Sitemap generator.

Here is the brief summary of its features:

  1. It has no limits for the number of pages included in sitemap
  2. It generates any kind of sitemap you require:
    XML sitemap
    HTML sitemap
    Images sitemap
    Video sitemap
    News sitemap
    Text formatted sitemap
    Mobile sitemap
  3. Images information can be optionally included in sitemap
  4. It will work for all sites including dynamic websites such as portals, blogs, forums, and online stores.
  5. Fast and easy installation onto the same host that should be crawled
  6. Support of LARGE websites, dividing the sitemap on the parts per 50,000 URLs each and creates a Sitemap Index file according to the Google sitemap protocol.
  7. Informs (ping) Google and other search engines automatically when sitemap generation is complete
  8. Any broken links that are detected by the application are reported on a special page, providing you with the URLs pages that refer to these bad links enabling you to fix them and keep the search engine robots on your site.
  9. Can be setup automatically with a cron job to create sitemaps without any user interaction
  10. Free Updates for life.

At $20, this is a fantastic investment for a web designerswhom would like to manage the SEP performance of their web sites