I’ve just made my first sitemap, woohoo!!
Ok, I’ve had it checked on the w3schools xml validator and it’s happy with the blurb I’ve written. I just have a few questions now as to how I should use this for the SEO benefits I’m led to believe it will give me:
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Do I simply submit the website url of the xml page eg www.mywebsite.com/sitemap.xml to the search engines and leave it at that? The sitemap will work it’s magic with the crawlers, just like that?
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When I see websites like this page here http://www.smartwebby.com/site_map.asp and it has a site map as shown, does that have anything to do with the multi-coloured code that is displayed in the brower that would appear in the xml raw form? To put it another way, this link I’ve just provided…is that essentially just html/css hand coded links, or does the actual sitemap.xml file have anything to do with it’s construction?
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How important is it for me to have something like the example shown above, or is that simply for ‘show’/listing the links in a simple format? Does it improve my SEO chances by having a page like that in HTML/CSS form, or would it need to be some fangled witchcraft spawned page that somehow uses the xml code to draw up the content?
Cheers, Rana
