A sitemap file is a fantastic way to promote your site content to search engines. However, in its XML format it is not particularly useful for anything else.

I have just posted an article for members in which I show you how to customise your sitemap to be human readible and provide some useful features.

View the article

Most website owners are aware of the usefulness of sitemaps in promoting their content to search engines. However, it has been frustrating up until now having to register them with each search engine and continually ping them when changes are made.

Well, I found out great news the other day that Yahoo has decided to start supporting the sitemap.org XML sitemap format rather than their own text format making site maintenance much easier. This means that you only need to produce one sitemap to let both Google and Yahoo know about updates to the content on your site.

Also, they are now supporting the new Sitemap location in the robots.txt file. This new tag allows search engines to auto discover where you have located your sitemap rather than making you submit them to each engine in turn.

To take advantage of this feature just add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap:

The should be the complete URL to the sitemap, such as http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.

It doesn't matter where in the file you put it, and if you are using a sitemap index for multiple sitemaps you can just put the location of that rather than individual listings for each file.