The value of RSS and XML Sitemaps

A sitemaps is a key component to SEO, providing a mechanisms to communicate with search engines and content agregators and tell them about your website.

While organic discovery is possible, it is far from ideal as you need to get the message out about th fact your website exists, what’s in it and importantly when it updates.

An XML sitemap is basically a computer readable list of the pages in your website, with other supporting information such as when it was last updated, how often it is updated, relative priority and then in some cases specifics such as page titles, images and other infomation.

As an example an XML Sitemap might look like this :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>  
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">  
<url>  
     <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>  
     <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>  
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>  
      <priority>0.8</priority>  
</url>  
</urlset>  

RSS feeds are essentialy XML data about the pages or information in your website.

RSS feeds are typically about informing search engines, directories and your users about new and updated content although they can also be used to detail all the pages in your website.

An RSS sitemap would look along the lines of :

<channel>  
<title>Website name</title>  
<link>http://www.xmlwitemapgenerator.com</link>  
<description>Website description here</description>  
  
<item>  
     <title>A Sitemap entry</title>  
     <link>http://www.xmlwitemapgenerator.com/example</link>  
     <description>Sitemap entry description</description>  
</item>  
<item>  
     <title>Another item</title>  
     <link>http://www.xmlwitemapgenerator.com/xml</link>  
     <description>Another entry description</description>  
</item>  
  
</channel>  

Of course, these are just simple examples, there are other properties and extensions that can be used to add more information.

The good thing about RSS feeds is that you can list all your new and updated webpages and submit them to the search engines, directories and content agregators to improve the inclusion of new content.

XmlSitemapGenerator.org allows webmasters to easily create RSS sitemaps for their website without the need to hand craft them, install software or write complicated scripts.

These can then be submitted to various search engines and website that accept XML sitemaps or RSS feeds.

Conclusion

XML Sitemaps and RSS feeds play an importnat role in content distribution and should be on your list of SEO tools especailly when they can be easily and freely generated.