Brief overview of the Sitemaps XML protocol for SEO

1. Sitemaps www.mihswat.com Rafiq Phillips @rafiq

2. What are Sitemaps? Inform Search Engines Additional Metadata

3. Inform Search Engines Why would you want to inform Search Engines?

4. Additional Metadata <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlsetxmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc> <lastmod>2010-02-04</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url> </urlset>

5. Additional Metadata <loc>http://www.news24.com/</loc> Must begin with http(s) and end with a trailing / < 2048 characters

6. Additional Metadata <lastmod>2010-02-04</lastmod> In YYYY-MM-DD format

7. Additional Metadata <changefreq>always</changefreq> always hourly daily weekly monthly yearly never

8. Additional Metadata <priority>0.8</priority> 0.0 to 1.0

9. Don’t forget Your Sitemap file must be UTF-8. As with all XML files, any data values (including URLs) must use entity escape codes for the characters listed in the table below.

10. Sitemap Index File <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <sitemapindexxmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <sitemap> <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc> <lastmod>2010-02-04T09:23:17+02:00</lastmod> </sitemap> </sitemapindex>

11. Letting Search Engines Know Robots.txt “Sitemap: http://www.news24.com/sitemapindex.xml” Ping the search engines… www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.news24.com%2Fsitemapindex.xml (URL encode everything after the /ping?sitemap=) Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Center, Yahoo! Site Explorer

12. More Sitemaps info Visit http://sitemaps.org/faq.php