Sitemaps Explained: How to build XML and HTML Sitemaps for B2B Websites

Sitemaps are not the sexiest topic to talk about when it comes to the internet and SEO, but they are extremely useful tools to communicate your content to the search engines and to you readers. This task is rather simple if you have a blog powered with WordPress or Joomla but it becomes quite an interesting task when dealing with large content sites. (i.e. Google itself).

This is a review of a sitemap from the basics to implementation We’ll review the proper code to be used and how to implemented in your website. This can be applied to any type of B2B (and other) websites with lots of content.

First, let’s get the basic stuff out of the way.

1. What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is a map of all the important links in your site usually broken down by category or topic. For a more technical explanation check out What is a sitemap? (source: .www.webdevelopersnotes.com)

2. What is a sitemap useful for?

A sitemap is useful for two things. It talks to search engines and helps humans navigate your site. The sitemap talks to the search engines and informs them about new URLs or updates to your existing content in existing pages via XML. The sitemap also helps humans to navigate your site by highlighting the different topic areas and  categories in an orderly fashion via HTML.

3. What sitemap formats should I care about?

The most important formats for a sitemap are two: The XML sitemap and the HTML sitemap. They both achieve the two things that I listed above. XML talks to the search engines and the HTML helps humans navigate.

It is important to understand the difference between the XML and the HTML sitemaps. The XML version needs to be maintained in order to be useful. The XML code carries indicators that will tell Google and other search engines about new URLs or fresh content to be indexed.

Now let’s dive into how to code an XML sitemap properly.

First, for sites built on top of open source software such as wordpress or joomla you are in luck because there are plugins that will do all the back end work for you and will deliver a nicely formatted automated sitemap in XML and HTML.

• For wordpress you can use the Google XML sitemap generator. It produces a nicely formatted XML file that then can be submitted to Google Webmasters tools. You can see an example by going to my own XML sitemap in this blog.
• For joomla you can search the extension directory for sitemap generator and ou can choose from a wide variety of options. Joomap is a good option for XML/HTML sitemap generation in Joomla.

For larger sites like B2B sites it really depends on your CMS. It might be that you are able to install a plugin to do this automatically or you can implement the google sitemap generator in your server. This requires knowledge of phyton and server side access to your site. However, if implemented properly, your site will benefit greatly from the script because the XML sitemap generation will be automated.

Some considerations to keep in mind for larger sites:

• An XML sitemap should not carry more than 50,000 URLs
• If your site has several large directories below the root, then it is recommended to create an XML sitemap for each section.
  • For instance, XML sitemaps should exist for:
    • Country specific websites
    • Topic specific directories
• Follow the guidelines offered by Google. The XML sitemap format and the XML tags should be properly determined and adequetedly formed.  Here is an example from Google’s guidelines that you can read on it entirety here.

The Sitemap Protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.

A sample Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags is shown below. The optional tags are in italics.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
   <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

• Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag.
• Include a <url> entry for each URL as a parent XML tag.
• Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

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4. Examples of websites using XML sitemaps

In order to understand how to utilize and how the XML would be loaded and displayed in your website and a search engine, I wanted to use a large enough website that is using XML sitemaps to talk to google. The chosen website is google.com

If you use this command to look for XML file types in the Google site, then you will see a sitemap.xml site popup as a first result in the search engine.

google search command: filetype:xml site:www.google.com

Google sitemap XML search

Depending on your browser, the XML file will display differently, but here is how it displays in firefox (it’s meant to be rendered like this):

XML Google sitemap

Final considerations

• The sitemap.xml file  is not meant to be seen by humans, hence there is no need to link to it from your website. The XML sitemap will be submitted to google via a ping or via google webmasters tools.

Ping example:  www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

Resources:

How to build a colorful sitemap using jQuery? (Smashing magazine) by @chriscoyier

Sitemap protocol (Google.com) Webmasters tools

XML-sitemaps - Follows the Google guidelines to build sitemaps if you don’t have access to the server.

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