Sitemap is very important for your website to be appeared in Search Engine. Sitemap tells the search engine about different pages or contents in your site. Create site map and submit it to the search engines. It ensures that the search engines know about all your pages.
Do we mandatorily need a Sitemap for our website? The answer is NO. Generally, the search engine spider crawls your site to gather relevant information about your site and then show it in search result. If you create site map and provide it to the search engines, it ensures that they will not miss any page or content. Sitemaps are specifically helpful in case of dynamic sites or sites having lots of Ajax, where the pages are otherwise can not be discovered by the spider.In Joomla, all the contents and other information are stored in the database and it dynamically generates the pages on request. Thus, it is very important that you create site map for your Joomla site and provide it to all the search engines. It is also imperative to create site map for the new sites, for which the search engines don’t get enough backlink from other sites.
Google introduced sitemap in order to show the dynamic pages in search result. The google sitemap file follows a particular format. The details of which can be found at http://www.sitemaps.org/ . A snippet of sitemap file is shown below
The xml sitemap protocol has been accepted by all the major search engines. The current xml sitemap protocol is 0.9. In the sitemap, multiple url tags are enclosed within urlset tag. You may find other tags namely “lastmod”, “changefreq” and “priority”. “lastmod” tag signifies the last modified date of the content. Priority denotes priority of the content and ranges from a scale of 0 to 1. “changefreq” signifies the frequency at which the contents are getting changed. The detail parameters of all these tags can be found in Sitemaps.org site. Other than xml format, you can create a site map file as text file or RSS feed.
Now coming to Joomla, You can create site map xml file manually or can take help of xmap extension. The manual process becomes laborious as you grow your website pages. Thus adopting xmap from the beginning does make sense. The link for downloading xmap is as given below
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/structure-a-navigation/site-map/3066
Once you install the component, you can go to component and can see the xmap entry.
On clicking the xmap entry, it will ask you to enable few xmap plugins. Enable these plugins and then go back to xmap component.
Click on New to generate a new sitemap. You can see three different sections i.e. Menus, Options and Sitemap. In menus, select all the menu that you want to include in your xml sitemap. You can also change the default priority and change frequency. Remember to select publish before saving the same. Once saved, you can see an entry as below.
The xml sitemap and News Sitemap (with in square brackets) are to create site map in xml format and news sitemap.
Supposing you want to provide the xml sitemap to google, follow the below steps.
a)Click on the link [Xml Sitemap]. It will open a window as below.
b)Now copy the portion of the link circled in red.
c) Log into Google Webmaster site.
d)Go to OptimizationàSitemaps
e)Click on Add/Test Sitemap and enter the copied url and submit.
Google will immediately validate your file. However, it will take its own time to crawl and index your pages.
If you prefer not to use the search engine’s webmaster site, there are two more options
a)Direct https submission – For direct http submission, you need to generate the xml file and keep in your root directory. Then enter the below url and the xml sitemap file will be submitted
<searchengine_URL>/ping?sitemap=sitemap_urlThe xml sitemap file can be saved locally by right clicking on the page after step a) above. Then you need to ftp the xml sitemap file to your website host.
b)You can provide this information to the search engines by providing the below entry in your robots.txt file (replace example.com with your website)
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xmlPlease let me know if you have any feedback on this.
Featured Photo courtesy : Search Engine People Blog through flickr.com
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