Sitemaps

Sitemap Overview

Sitemap is an important part of any website. This section covers the purpose of sitemaps, how to use them and sitemap.xml

Visitor Sitemaps

Sitemaps and WebEd

A sitemap is diagrammatic representation of the structure of your website. It shows how the website is arranged or organized into pages, sections and sub sections. It is much like an organisational structure chart that shows how your company is organised. Below is a theoretical sitemap for a website.

• WebEd automatically generates a site map of your website for you.

• A site map is a useful tool as it gives you an overview of all pages on the website, whether the page is online or not.

• Site Maps appear differently to your visitors as they do to a logged-in administrator of the website.

• The site map shows the status of your pages and allows you to edit directly from the sitemap, this makes the sitemap a handy way to quickly view the pages and jump to any page for fast editing

The site map icon is located at the bottom of the screen:

The sitemap appears differently for visitors and for logged-in users of the website.

Site administrators get to see all sections, even those hidden or offline

They also see the edit and delete links

Examples of a sitemap views for visitors vs. administrators:

• This is how the sitemap appears for visitors

  

• This is how the sitemap appears for administrators when logged in.

  

The sitemap gives a fast way to move around your site. You can also edit or create new pages as required.

Sitemap.xml

• A special kind of sitemap is used by search engines to help them find all the pages of your site
• You can review the sitemap.xml by using any browser and going to your domain example MyDomain.com/sitemap.xml
• All pages online will be presented in the sitemap.xml, even if they are marked to Hide From Navigation
• All pages shown on your site which can be found by users (though navigation or another link on the page) will be presented to the search engines
• To hide a page from the search engine, ensure it is taken offline

Summary of Sitemaps