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Using A Sitemap

Using a Sitemap

While search engines can usually find your pages by the way they are linked from other places on the internet, it is good practice to create a Sitemap which gives search engine 'bots' a list of the pages on your website - think of it as a map to find all the content on your site. Sitemaps are not only important for search engines, they are also very helpful for people with disabilities who may need a simple interface to view your site structure and navigate around the site without using your menu structures. W3C Working Group Note on Sitemaps

A sitemap serves several purposes:

  • Provides a structured list showing an overview of all content on your website
  • Allows a visitor to quickly get an overview of your site structure
  • Provides an alternative way of navigating your website, without the need for complex menu structures
  • Provides search engines with a means of finding content which might not be available through your menu structures (e.g. landing pages)

Types of Sitemap

It is possible to provide sitemaps for specific types of information, including:

These specialist sitemaps allow you to provide information relating to the specific media type - for example with a video sitemap you can provide information about the running time, category and family friendly status; with image sitemaps you can specify the subject of the image, its license for use, and type of image.

Creating a sitemap

On a static site, creating a sitemap is simply a case of manually creating an XML file using the appropriate standards, and saving it as an XML file. On a dynamic site, where content changes regularly, this is not really an option - you would have to manually update the sitemap file every time you added some new content!

For this reason there are several sitemap extensions available on the Joomla Extensions Directory (Sitemap category on Joomla Extensions Directory) which allow you to dynamically build a sitemap which meets the sitemap standards expected by search engines. Sitemaps protocol

Most of these extensions work by choosing menu items which you wish to include in a sitemap, and specifying how often they change (see Update Frequency). It is also possible to include sub-pages from those menu items (for example, a menu item might lead to a category blog page, but you want to display all the articles which are shown on this page as individual items - another example might be a menu item pointing at a shop category page, and in the sitemap you would want to list the category, and then each product within it as a separate link).

Update Frequency

While you can manually specify in your Sitemap how frequently search engine spiders should visit your website, most search engines have in-built systems which automatically adjust the frequency of return visits based on how often the page in question has changed.

So, for example, if you tell search engine bots to visit your page on a daily basis, but when it visits the page nothing has changed for a week, it may adjust the frequency of revisits accordingly and not return as often as you told it to. You can request, via the various webmasters portals, for the revisit rate to be amended if required.

This would suggest, therefore, that if you have regularly changing content, your website will be 'spidered' more frequently - leading to content being indexed quicker than websites which do not change often.

It is generally sensible to specify pages which are static to be crawled less frequently than those which change regularly. For example, a static text article might be set with an update frequency of once a month, whereas your blog or news page may be set with an update frequency of once a day or once a week, depending on how often you add new content.

HTML Sitemaps

An HTML sitemap is essentially a table of contents for your site which you can make available to visitors of your website. This serves two purposes:

  1. It provides a place where visitors can go to easily get to any content on your site, even if it isn't necessarily easy to access by other navigation aids on the site
  2. It provides a centralised store of links to the content on your site that can be easily indexed by search engines
  3. It allows users with disabilities to be able to quickly navigate your website with a simple list of links, rather than through complex menus

At the very least, a sitemap should link to the main sections and pages within your site, but the more detailed you can make it, the better.

There are available extensions previously mentioned that create sitemaps automatically based on Joomla content.

XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about new and existing pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

  1. An XML sitemap provides a list of links to the content on your site that can be easily indexed by search engines
  2. It is possible to create specific XML sitemaps for News, Mobile URLs, Images, and Video

There are available extensions that create XML sitemaps automatically based on Joomla content.