Sitemaps

Sitemaps are always a little fun. You get to see just how many pages your site has and which ones are more important to you. But, they are really important for search engines. It helps the automated search spiders find all the pages you have and then they can gain a helpful perspective based on the last update and your priority ranking.

This is the website to check out if you want to learn more about Sitemaps: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

I usually do my sitemaps in PHP. So, I am going to break new ground here and drop some code on my blog. Since most of my sites are now PHP, here is what I typically use:

<?PHP header("Content-Type: text/xml; charset= UTF-8"); ?>
<?PHP echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"?>\n"; ?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
 <url>
  <loc>http://www.mydomain.com/</loc>
  <lastmod><?PHP 
     echo date ("Y-m-d", filemtime("index.php")); 
     ?></lastmod>
  <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
  <priority>0.5</priority>
 </url>
 <url>
  same stuff here...
 </ulr>
 
 ... and add more urls as needed
 
</urlset>

Make sure you test the URL in your browser first, but then it should be good to go. You can let the search engines know about it in the webmaster tools or even add a reference to it in your robots.txt file ("Sitemap: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.php").