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Did you know that you can customize your sitemap?

Thursday, April 12th, 2007

Generating a sitemap for your site is an important step in optimizing it for the search engines. However, they tend to be very unpretty. See the sitemap on this site, for example. Not exactly a thing of beauty.

Chris over at Pearsonified explains how you can stylize your sitemap by using the WordPress page template system. And for those of you using his Cutline theme, he has an XHTML sitemap that is formatted specifically for that theme.

Use an XHTML Sitemap for Better Indexing>>

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Make your sitemap work for your by modifying your robots.txt file

Wednesday, April 11th, 2007

Quick Online Tips explains that beyond installing a sitemap on your site, you can help search engines find your sitemap more efficiently:

Ask.com, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo! have announced support of “autodiscovery” of Sitemaps. The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately.

This step is very useful as webmasters can easily submit their content to the search engines and benefit from reduced unnecessary traffic by the crawlers. The search engines get information with regards to pages to index as well as metadata with clues about which pages are newly updated and which pages are identified as the most important and search users get more fresh content.

Complete details as to how to modify your robots.txt file in order to implement this feature is in the post.

Add Sitemaps Autodiscovery in Robots.txt File>> 

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