The Deal with Site Maps

For SEO and usability purposes, it is beneficial for your website to have two kinds of Site Maps. One site map is specifically for the benefit of users on your site, to help them navigate the different pages, and also to help organize and link all pages on your site together.

Ideally, this site map would be in HTML format, divided into sections, and provide clear links with descriptive text to each of the pages or sections of your site.

The second type of site map to upload to your site is specifically used by search engine spiders, to help locate and index the content of your site. This site map is in XML format, and is ideally uploaded to the highest directory possible on your site's server.

Google provides more information on site maps here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40318

In a previous post I mentioned a helpful XML site map generator online at XMLsitemaps.com, but I have found that this tool limits you to 500 pages if you don't want the paid upgrade. In search of a more useful site map generating tool, I discovered the Audit My PC Free Google Sitemap Generator.

For free, this tool will thoroughly analyze the pages of your site and generate a comprehensive site map following rules you set up if you so choose (rules including "ignore images," "respect no-follow links," "respect links disallowed in robots.txt," etc.), and will allow you to export both the site map XML file itself, as well as a report on all site links. This will allow you to identify broken links and URLs on your site, as well as pages that time-out when loading. I highly recommend this tool for generating and analyzing your own sitemap.xml.

By the way, once you've created and uploaded your XML sitemap file, don't forget to make full use of it by uploading it to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer. ;)