Sitemaps are XML files that you upload to Google, MSN, Yahoo, Ask etc. search engines (only the top ones allow this). It's very easy to create a sitemap.
It has headers etc. exactly like an HTML file:
Code:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
and adding URL's to be crawled by the search engine spiders are also simple, here's an extract of mine (not all of it).
Code:
<url>
<loc>http://housebaked.zzl.org</loc>
<lastmod>2008-04-10</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://housebaked.zzl.org/about.php</loc>
<lastmod>2008-03-05</lastmod>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://housebaked.zzl.org/faq.php</loc>
<lastmod>2008-04-01</lastmod>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://housebaked.zzl.org/contact.php</loc>
<lastmod>2008-03-05</lastmod>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://housebaked.zzl.org/copy.php</loc>
<lastmod>2008-03-06</lastmod>
</url>
The lastmod and priority options are optional. At the end you just close it with </urlset> Check out
http://www.sitemaps.org for more information.