Setting up a Sitemap, need help?

sitemap

[halcyonlost]

Hey Guys,

So how exactly do I setup a sitemap? Do I just list the main links of my site below like this.

Link01 / Link02 / link03

or is there more to it then that?

Thanks in advance,
Hal

[canuck]

Link the sitemap from your homepage. Also, make the sitemap useful to more than just the SE bots... take a look at Google's sitemap, it's not bad: google.com/sitemap.html

Try some descriptive anchor text for the links - nothing wrong with making sitemaps useful to your visitors! ;)

[TechnoGeek]

Hi, halcyonlost.
Basically, a sitemap is a collection of links to all the pages in your website. The simplest form is to write all the links in a sequential fashion, with or without descriptive anchor text. It can be seen as a help to search engines so that all your pages get indexed. This is specially useful in case you use some kind of linking that involves JavaScript. This sometimes cause troubles to search engines.
You can also set up a sitemap as a navigational aid for your users, as canuck said. In this case is more appropriate some sort of hierarchical layout.
The Google sitemap is another thing. It is written in XML and it is not intended to be seen by users. You have better read Google's site to learn its details.
Good luck.

[halcyonlost]

Thanks guys for the help. I setup a sitemap in this format:

www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml and it seem to be working.

I also set my links up on the main page as follows:

Home [vertical line] Link 2 [vertical line] link3, ect.

so it looks somethink like this:

Home / link 1 / link2 / link 3

I feel that I am doing something wrong, any help would be appreciated.

Regards.