Creating a Sitemap File for Search Engines

When publishing to HTML or XHTML output you can create a sitemap file listing the published web pages. The file is used to inform search engines that you have pages available for crawling, and can be submitted to Google or Yahoo.

The sitemap file is created when you add your web address as the Base URL in the book's web tab. You can add the URL to the book or the book template. When you publish the book the file is created and added to your publishing folder.

Note: The sitemap file lists the published pages, but does not include entries for the page priority, update frequency, or date of the last file update. For more information on using sitemaps to enable search engine crawling see www.sitemaps.org.

As an example, by adding "http://www.acme.com/kc/" to the Base URL field in the Book's Web tab, the publisher creates a sitemap XML file listing the URL to each of the files:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

<!-- generator="author-it" -->

<!-- sitemap-generator-url="http://www.acme.com" -->

<url><loc>http://www.acme.com/kc/index.htm</loc></url>

<url><loc>http://www.acme.com/kc/149.htm</loc></url>

<url><loc>http://www.acme.com/kc/150.htm</loc></url>

...

<url><loc>http://www.acme.com/kc/indexpage.htm</loc></url>

</urlset>

After publishing (and uploading your content to the appropriate web server directory) you can submit the sitemap file to Google and Yahoo so they can crawl your site. The following links provide instructions for uploading the file:

• Submitting a sitemap to Google: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
• Submitting a sitemap to Yahoo: http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

To Update the Base URL:

1. Locate the book or book template. Select the object then right-click and choose Properties. The Properties window opens.
2. Choose the Web tab. Add the your website's URL to the Base URL field.

   Important: Ensure you include a forward slash after the web URL, for example, http://acme.com/
   If you don't include the final backslash the address won't resolve correctly.

3. Save the changes.