lab188

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Sitemap generators

A bevy of online site map generators help the search engines find your content.

The GYM (Google/Yahoo/Microsoft) group agrees that your site content needs to be more accessible to their search engine crawlers. And many site builders include a page with text links to the site content for the search engines. The Group of Three now agree on a standard xml vocabulary for the search engines. Build the .xml file, place it in the root of the site, and the crawlers can index your content in a more comprehensive fashion.

The problem comes quickly to bear when you want to generate the xml. Google has a great deal of information about usage for webmasters and Google provides a nice Python script that you must place on the site and invoke. Handy for automatically generating the file, but somewhat more work than some like. And some web servers and hosts may not allow the script to run or support it. And rolling your own xml file is great fun, but most of us have more pressing content deadlines.

This being the web, then, it didn’t take long for people to automate the process and spawn a number of web sites that will generate the sitemap files for you:
For xml fans and those of us who like to know what is going on under the hood, there is Sitemaps.org.
Build sitemap files for a number of different uses at XML-Sitemaps.
Some useful information at Free Sitemap Generator, but it looks like it hasn’t been maintained for awhile and the forum entries look a bit sketchy. . .