Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET: A Developer's Guide to SEO

Chapter 9. Sitemaps

A sitemap provides an easy way for both humans and search engines to reference pages of your web site from one central location. Usually, the sitemap enumerates all, or at least the important, pages of a site. This is beneficial for humans in that it can be a navigational aide, and for search engines, because it may help a web site get spidered more quickly and comprehensively.

In this chapter you learn about:

• The two types of sitemaps: traditional sitemaps and search engine sitemaps.

• The Google XML sitemaps standard.

• The Yahoo! plaintext sitemaps standard.

• The new sitemaps.org standard — implemented by all search engines.

You'll implement ASP.NET code that generates both Google and Yahoo! search engine sitemaps programmatically. But first, this chapter starts at the beginning and talks about traditional sitemaps.

Traditional Sitemaps

A traditional sitemap is simply an HTML web page that contains links to the various pages of your web site. Typically the page breaks down the pages into groupings for easy reading. This kind of sitemap is generally designed to assist humans in navigating, but search engine marketers realized early on that it had a beneficial side effect of helping spiders to crawl a site.

Historically, search engines did not crawl very deeply into a web site, and it helped to link pages located deeper in the site hierarchy (that is, one must traverse many pages to arrive there) from a sitemap page. Today, that particular problem is mostly squashed (search ...