A standard Sitemap for Search Engine Optimization

Those of you familiar in creating sitemaps for Search Engine Optimization purposes will know that there are several different file types, or methods, that are currently used.

One method is to employ an HTML or XHTML sitemap. This usually takes the form of a page within your site, linked to as “Sitemap”, which not only provides the search engines with links to your pages, but also provides a hierarchical sitemap for your website users.

Another is an XML sitemap, this is the sitemap type currently preferred by Google. Those of you familiar with Google Webmaster Tools will have created such files in the past.

The third common type is a plain text file simply containing the URL names, i.e. urllist.txt, this file has up to now been accepted by Yahoo! as a sitemap file.

In recent weeks, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, the 3 biggest web search engines, have come together to agree on a single sitemap standard, based around the XML model.

The implications of this for Search Engine Optimization are good. Effectively meaning that in the future, webmasters will only have to create one Sitemap file to serve all web crawlers.

Specifications for the agreed sitemap standard, and further guidelines, can be found at the newly created sitemaps.org - a site created by the Google / Yahoo / Microsoft consortium.

Mike Irving
SEO Programmer

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