SMarT Marketing

Most people are familiar with the term “site map”, but how does it differ from “sitemap? Besides the obvious spelling, these two terms have different meanings. A site map is a collection of plain text links to all of the pages on your website. A sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site in addition to providing metadata about each of those URLs.

Site Map
Site maps are standard on most websites and are most commonly linked to in the footer section of the site. By providing a site map, you will be providing a resource for you site visitor who can not find the site information they are looking for. The site map page will also assist in helping search engines spiders to index all of the content on the site.

Sitemap
Google and Yahoo have really pushed the new XML sitemap protocol recently. Google Webmaster Central allows site owners to add a sitemap to help them to properly index your entire site. Yahoo Site Explorer also allows you to submit a sitemap. This is really helpful if you are noticing that some of your URLs have not been indexed by Yahoo. Both of these services are free to use, but required one to be logged into their respective services. To learn more about sitemaps please visit sitemaps.org

This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 9:31 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.