All About XML Sitemaps – The Marketing Minute

In today's episode of the Marketing (almost) Minute I'm looking at the importance of a correctly formatted and updated XML sitemap. Often times this is poorly implemented on a site. There are a number of "optional" tags meaning you can get away without implementing them but I strongly recommend you make sure you are implementing a full URLSet. Keep in mind that if you are running a dynamically generated site, this becomes even more important. In order to keep up with the changes on your site you're going to want to get the Google Sitemap Generator and install it on your server. More details in the podcast. Click the image below to Play the podcast. Note: This is a pretty "grass roots" podcast :) In time it will become more refined but for the time being keep in mind my main motivation for doing this is to give out some good tips that you might not find everywhere else in the universe. I'm refining the links I place in the podcast itself as clicking them will take you away from the site. For now these are the links in the podcast: Sitemaps XML Format Third Party Sitemap Generators Google Server Side Sitemap Generator Here's the example for the suggested format:

<?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>