Ever since Google create "Google sitemaps",
which later got renamed to XML sitemaps,
the world has seen an ever growing number of
sitemap formats for websites.
No longer is it enough to create HTML sitemaps
for your websites, you also need XML sitemaps,
image sitemaps, video sitemaps, sitemaps for
mobile content and that is only the beginning!
This article will summarize the format of most
popular sitemap file kinds and give you the necessary
information to determine your website sitemap needs!
HTML sitemaps:
These are old school sitemaps. You create them to:
Help your visitors navigate your website
Motivate search engines to follow links deep into your website.
The important thing here is to remember:
These files are called HTML sitemaps, but you can
infact generate them using any program or server-side
language. It is the output content that has to be in
HTML or XHTML. This way both internet browsers used by
real humans and search engine crawlers can benefit from them.
If you have many pages in your website, you may want to either:
Only list the most important website "hubs" and pages.
Create a multi-page HTML sitemap keeping each to 100 links or below.
XML Sitemaps:
The name "XML sitemaps" was coined by Google
and other search engines to represent their shared
XML sitemaps protocol.
Originally developed by Google, other search engines such as
Yahoo, Bing and ASK quickly followed to support this new format.
With this sitemap file type, you basicly submit to search engines
a complete list of all the URLs in your website that you want crawled.
If your sitemap generator tool supports it, the XML sitemaps protocol
also allows you to add things such as priority for each URL.
While it started simple like described above,
Google has now expanded upon XML sitemaps
protocol to include:
Image Sitemaps
Video Sitemaps
News Sitemaps
Mobile Sitemaps
Code Sitemaps
These formats are currently not supported by
other search engines such as Yahoo, Ask and Bing.
The purpose of these formats are easy to understand.
If for instance you have a website that is rich on images,
say a websites featuring wallpapers or photographies,
creating an image sitemap will help them getting indexed.
ATOM and RSS Feed Files:
Many search engines such as Google and Bing will
allow you to submit feeds from forums, blogs and similar.
The advantage is you do not have to create an XML sitemap
file, but instead can use auto-generated feed files.
Do remember though that feeds not always contain all
URLs in your website, forum or blog. Instead they
often only contain new pages.
Feeds are a great fallback solution if you for some reason
can not generate an XML sitemap of your website.
Building Sitemaps:
Many free tools provide support for creating
normal XML sitemap files supported by all search engines.
Most are, however, limited in number of URLs they can handle.
If you want to create some of the newer XML sitemap formats such as
Mobile Sitemaps, you can check commercial solutions such as
A1 Sitemap Generator.
For a complete list of sitemapper solutions, check Google's compilation of
sitemappers.
There are quite a few, and your choice will ultimately also depend
on the kind of sites you have. If you own
a blog or forum, there may already exist a plugin or module for making sitemaps.
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