Big site optimization - the need for sitemaps
March 24, 2006 – 9:37 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Big websites need to help crawlers find interior pages more than smaller sites do. If you maintain a complex website, with many categories and a ton of pages, you need to make sitemaps that explain clearly to your crawlers how your website is built.
First, let’s get our terminology concerning sitemaps straight.
When I refer to sitemaps, I’m not referring to the product known as Google Sitemaps which was created by search giant Google, Inc., and will not help you with any other search engine. I am referring to you making your own sitemap as the definition implies:
A hierarchical visual model of the pages of a Web site. Site maps help users navigate through a Web site that has more than one page by showing the user a diagram of the entire site’s contents. Similar to a book’s table of contents, the site map makes it easier for a user to find information on a site without having to navigate through the site’s many pages. Also, in SEO, a site map can make it easier for a search engine spider to find all a site’s pages.
They aren’t kidding when they say a sitemap could make life easier for everyone, especially spiders, when it comes to discovering pages on your website.
I’m convinced, how do I make a sitemap?
As always, the answer to this question depends on your system setup. If you’re using some sort of programming language and database to generate your pages, then the job gets super easy. Using PHP and MySQL, your task looks like the following:
- Query your database to find out how many pages your site has
- Using a limiter, determine your configuration of next and previous pages.
- Paginate your results
- Build the sitemap automatically
- Finish it off with mod_rewrite so it has clean URLs
This method has a further advantage: the sitemap generation is completely automated, and you just can’t miss. Everytime someone adds a new page on your website, you add them seemlessly to the sitemap. This eliminates guesswork and error, which can destroy any website if left unchecked.
I won’t go into details on this setup in this post, but will do that another time. For beginners, you’ll need to start with the basics.
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