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Making Your Site Search Engine Friendly with EZ-SITEMAP
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Section 2 - Why Site Maps are Important, A Brief History and Description
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The “bot” readable site map became of interest in 2005, when the major search engine, Google, announced that its “bots” would read site map files if they were told about them. While Google did not say how they would use the information, it is interesting that they would accept this information. Soon afterwards in 2006, a consortium of the major search engines adopted a standard format for site map files. As a result, only one site map is needed for all of the major search engines. The text below show the format of this xml file. It may look strange to you now. But once you see one of your web pages, it will make a lot more sense. If you want to learn more about the consortium, click on www.sitemap.org.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
- <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
- <url>
<loc>http://www.majesticscenes.com/index.html</loc>
<lastmod>2007-07-05</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
- <url>
<loc>http://www.majesticscenes.com/aboutus.html</loc>
<lastmod>2007-06-27</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
The site map is an index the page in your web site. It specifies important information about each page, but not all of the information about that page. Currently only the four following pieces of information about each page are cataloged in the site map.
- The URL to the web page (this is the address you need in your web browser.)
- The date the page was last modified
- How often the page is updated
- The relative priority of this page to the entire web site.
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