You DO NOT have to use the name the xml sitemap program suggests and in fact should be as careful about your naming convention as you would your password. Google does not care how you name your sitemap file, so be creative and so get creative and protect your niche with a filename that’s hard or impossible to guess!

Take this excerpt from a sitemap.xml file:

(url)
(loc)somesite(/loc)
(priority)1.0(/priority)
(loc)somesite/giant-fish.php(/loc)
(priority)0.9(/priority)
(loc)somesite/fishing-report.php(/loc)
(priority)0.9(/priority)
(loc)somesite/fishing-gear.php(/loc)
(priority)0.5(/priority)
(loc)somesite/fishing-rods.php(/loc)
(priority)0.2(/priority)
(loc)somesite/glow-spoons.php(/loc)
(priority)0.2(/priority)

If I were to visit my competitors site/sitemap.xml I would see a complete listing of what is considered high priority, in this case it would be the terms giant fish and fishing report. Although this is an example, a real site would show a ton of hot terms considered important by the webmaster.

Besides keeping the name of your sitemap xml file private, you also need to consider the service you’re using. There are a number of programs out there that may keep a copy of your hot terms for later use. For example, a plugin / extension / module or online sitemap program could analyze the sitemap url, determine if the website itself is popular, then record all the terms with a priority greater than 0.8 and store it for later use.

Tip: want to see if a program you are running on your PC is communicating with a website? Use TCPView By Mark Russinovich at Windows Sysinternals (Microsoft). The only site it should be communicating with is the website you’re building a XML sitemap for! This works for programs that run on your computer, such as ones you have downloaded or java based applications. Sitemap plugins, modules and extensions can’t be monitored this way.

Moral of the story: Use a unique name for your xml file and make sure your sitemap program is not recording and reporting your top terms or you may find a new competitor on your heels!

Sitemap Plugin for WordPress, Extensions for Joomla or Modules for Drupal, they all run inside your website. These programs look at the database to gather information about what should be included in your sitemap.

Because they run from within your website, they are extremely fast in comparison to online (external) XML Sitemap programs. However, that speed comes with a price, the price of seeing your site as a search engine bot would.

For example, say that you reference an article that doesn’t exist or a page that has invalid code, your WordPress sitemap plugin is not going to catch the error. Perhaps you have invalid redirects in your htaccess file or other problem that can’t be found by scanning the database, in such cases, Modules, Plugins and Extensions just won’t catch it.

So what’s the solution? Depending on how often you modify your website, use the external program (online sitemap generator) to periodically verify your site is error free while using the module, plugin or extension to updates XML Sitemaps as content is added.

For example, a great WordPress Sitemap Plugin would be Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold while an excellent online tool (and great for seo as well) would be AuditMyPC.com’s XML Sitemap tool. AuditMyPC’s tool is going to find errors that Brachhold’s plugin missed, but is slower on very large sites. Note: if you are using multiple WordPress blogs on one site, then you’ll want AuditMyPC.com’s tool for the correct wordpress multi site sitemap.

Both these programs are completely free, have been proven time and time again and regularly updated. Whichever software you choose, make sure your site is error free BEFORE submitting your sitemap.

These priorities are set by you and are only suggestions to search engines; search engines will decide for themselves what’s important and what’s not. Many state that the priority is not taken into account by the search engines and it’s the way you link to your own pages that determine the importance. I believe the main purpose of the sitemap building, both the html and xml sitemap, is to help search engines find your internal pages.

In fact, if a search engine can’t find one of your internal pages, then you seriously need to examine your code. Search engines do a great job at finding all your links, some even follow javascript, so when your page is not listed in the search results, you’re doing something wrong. Perhaps you have duplicate titles or descriptions, perhaps the server is producing an error you’re not aware of, but being seen by the bots.

The best way to find out why you are not being indexed is to crawl your site as a search engine bot would. AuditMyPC’s free sitemap generator (http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp) will show you a graphical representation of your site including server errors, server headers (the way your site responds to computers requesting information), duplicate titles, descriptions and does sitemap building (both html and xml) for all search engines. If you don’t spot it yourself, then leave a comment explaining your problem and what you have don’t to fix it to get free support.

No matter what you have running, be it a content management system or custom code, you need to make sure your site is error free BEFORE you submit your sitemap; you want that initial crawl from the search engines to grab correct data or it could take up to six months to correct the mistakes depending on site popularity.

I initially mentioned that some sitemap building software can harm your rankings and decided to create a separate page for this with instructions on how to discover such deception. Should I find such software during my reviews, I will clearly alert you of such on the associated page.