When developing huge sites or sites that have frequently updated pages , such as new product pages in a shop. It is important that you make it as easy as you possibly can for the Google spiders to crawl and index your page.

Creating a site map should be your first job when finishing development or creating new pages.

There are generally two approaches to creating xml site maps, one option is to create you own from scratch and the other is to use an xml site map generator then edit the output before submitting. The latter is usually favored unless you are making a small change to the structure of your site.

Your typical site map will contain the internal linking structure of your site and will generally have 3 information tags , lastmod, changefreq and priority.

<lastmod> Is used to tell google when a page has been updated or modified in anyway.

<changefreq> Is used to give information to the spiders reguarding how often the page is updated. Daily,Weekly,Monthly.

<priority> Is used to inform the spiders of the most important pages of your site, navigation pages etc.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that site maps are old hat or think that they are to hard to create, because anything that may potentially speed up the amount of time it take for your site to be index is worth doing.

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