SEO Question: Are you suppose to link an XML site map to the home page? If not, what do you do?

Question

I know creating an XML Site Map is suppose to help your SEO.

1)What do you do with the xml file once you have it created?
2)Are there any good/free sites that will help create the xml file?

Answer 1

No, you do not link it to anything.



Just generate a Google-compatible xml sitemap and put it in the root of your web folder (i.e. in the same folder as your home page). I recommend the link below to generate your site map automatically.



You should study the generated site map very carefully. Are any pages missing? If so, then you have navigation problems which are a probable result of using JavaScript for your menus (search engines can not crawl JavaScript).



In addition to having an xml sitemap, you should include an HTML site map and link to it using an ordinary HTML link (not JacaScript) from your home page. This guarantees that all the pages on your site will be spidered (but not necessarily listed) by all search engines.



There is one thing you can do with your xml sitemap. Submit it directly to Google. Sign up for free Google Webmaster Tools (see second link, below) and submit your site map. While you're at it, do the same thing for Bing.

Answer 2

Depending on what platform you are using for your site, you may be able to find plugins to help with the generation of the sitemap.



On Wordpress, there is the very good "Google XML Sitemaps" plugin by Arne Brachold. This will generate the sitemap for you, put it in the right place on your site and then ping Google, Yahoo and Bing to let them know it has been changed. It updates automatically as you add posts to the site.

Answer 3

The easiest and simplest way is simply add this to the bottom of your robots.txt file:



Sitemap: http://yourwebdomainhere.com/sitemap.xml