A clean and well organized sitemap is one of the most important SEO tools that you can employ at the launch of your new web design project. With a well developed sitemap.xml file, you will actually be pointing search engine crawlers to every page that you have included in your website. Without the file, pages that are not directly linked off of your front page could potentially be ignored and remain unlisted in the search engine results.
To build a successful site map, use the following steps:
1. Make a list of each page on your your website and its URL.
2. Assign each of the pages a priority ranking, which is a number between zero and one.
3. Make a note of when each page was last updated.
4. Assign an update frequency for each page. This could be daily, weekly, etc.
Once you have this information for your site, you are prepared to put together the site map file for your website. If you have created your website using a content management system, there is probably a site map generator plug-in that you can use to automatically generate this file for you. If not, consider using a professional web design firm to assist you with this project.
