Why You Should Use an XHTML Sitemap?

Why? Because Google Said So.

In its Webmaster Guidelines, Google touts the merits of adding a sitemap to your site.

• Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
• Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site.

Over time, you will likely accumulate tons of pages, and as this happens, the odds of certain pages getting buried to the point of becoming nearly inaccessible tend to go up.

To combat this, you can generate an XHTML sitemap that contains links to every page of your site.

Now, some of you may be thinking that your archives essentially solve this problem, but in a vast majority of cases, you’d be wrong .

Typically, wordpress archive pages (and other CMS archive pages, for that matter) do not contain links to all of your internal Pages and available syndication feeds. On top of that, most archives also fail to link to every Post.

A properly-constructed XHTML sitemap solves this problem.
For this, you can build it yourself or you can chose the easy way(a wordpress plugin).

Some of its features include:

support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and many other options.

To see it in action, visit my sitemap page.

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