Dragil Blog – San Francisco Bay Area Web Design and Web Development Company Located in Palo Alto California

Last week we accessed Google Webmaster Tools for the first time and saw that it allows one to upload (rather indicate the location of it) Google sitemaps for each of the managed sites. So we decided to create one manually for our main site and placed it into the root directory.

When using WordPress it is rather easy to create and maintain sitemaps since there is an available plugin (“Google Sitemap Generator”) that takes care of that and also updates it whenever there are any changes to the site.

A sitemap is basically a simple xml file that lists all URLs for a site.  Additional information such as the last change date or how often the page is being changed can be specified for each URL allowing search engines to crawl and index the site more efficiently.

Below is a very simple example of a Google sitemap:

<urlset xsi:schemaLocation=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84                      http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd”>

<url>
<loc>http://www.dragil.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-08-28T00:19:35+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>

</urlset>

If there are at least two URLs/pages it makes sense to add a priority tag to each URL. That allows the search engines to prioritize the pages for the entire site.