General blog posts
📌 What is an XML Sitemap?
Monday 1 January 0001
What is a sitemap? Sitemaps are a vital component of website maintainance and SEO, serving as a means to communicate with search engines and facilitate the discovery of web content. In addition to the ubiquitous XML sitemaps, this document will also touch upon other formats such as RSS and HTML sitemaps. As well as the list of pages you can advise search engines on when the page was last updated, how often it is updated and the relative priority of each page within your website.
📌 XML Sitemap example download
Monday 1 January 0001
XML Sitemap Example If you are familiar with RSS feeds you can think of an XML sitemap a bit like a special RSS feed for all of your website. An XML sitemap uses XML to represent all the pages of your website in a structured format to provide search engines with important information about the content of your website . The Sitemap protocol is an open standard supported by the main search engines including Google, Microsoft Bing, Yandex, Baidu and more.
📌 Which is the best XML sitemap generator for me?
Monday 1 January 0001
Which is the best XML Sitemap Generator for you? There are a range of sitemap generators available for your website and they come in a number of forms. Online spiders, tools to download and run on your PC as well as scripts to install on your server. Which sitemap generator is best for you will depend on your circumstances. Some questions to think about when choosing your sitemap generator include:
📌 Basic HTML concepts for sitemaps
Monday 1 January 0001
Basic HTML concepts This page provides basic information about key HTML concepts which are helpful when it comes to sitemaps and how our spider processes your website. Head meta tags In the header of your page there can sometimes be tags that direct search engines and our spider. For most pages you will want it to index and follow. Our spider automatically follows these rules. <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> Links and query strings The XmlSitemapGenerator will follow all standard links such as the below example
📌 Robots.txt XML Sitemap Entries
Monday 1 January 0001
Robots.txt sitemap entries The robots.txt file is a file based tool for controlling how search engines crawl and index your website. One of its key features is the ability to specify the location of your XML sitemap(s). Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do it: Create or Access Your robots.txt File: If you don’t already have a robots.txt file, you can create one in the root directory of your website.
📌 Filtering your XML Sitemap using regular expressions
Monday 1 January 0001
Filtering sitemap pages and images Filtering is a powerful feature that allows you to precisely control which pages and images are excluded from your sitemap in our online and windows sitemap generator. This guide will walk you through the process of creating filtering rules using expressions, ranging from simple wildcard expressions to more advanced techniques. We follow the ANSI-92 standard for our filtering expressions. Simple Wildcard Filters Wildcard expressions provide a flexible way to match URLs based on patterns.
📌 Notifying search engines about your XML sitemap
Monday 1 January 0001
Publishing Your XML Sitemap and Notifying Search Engines It is assumed that you have generated your sitemap and uploaded to a suitable location on your website or blog (usually the root folder). The next step is to ensure it is accessible and known to search engines. Robots.txt It is important to include your sitemap in your robots.txt file as this will ensure it is organically doscoverable however it should be noted that this alone does not ensure your website and sitemap ges discovered.
📌 XML Sitemap Frequently Asked Questions
Monday 1 January 0001
XML Sitemaps Frequently Asked Questions What is an XML sitemap? An XML sitemap is a file that lists all the pages of your website, providing essential information to search engines like Google about the structure and content of your site. You can find more on the What is an XML sitemap page. Why do I need an XML sitemap? An XML sitemap helps search engines discover and index your web pages more efficiently.