Creating an accurate sitemap is a necessity for seo. In addition it serves as an important usability feature for your website. However building a sitemap manually can be a tedious job, and if you have a dynamic site (such as a blog) it can be even harder to keep your sitemap accurate.

Fortunately by using url rewriting and coldfusion we can create a dynamic site map which is built directly by our database on loading. Further we can apply this technique to styling the sitemap using xsl. Here's how.

Before creating a sitemap dynamically let first create one manually to detail the structure.

Step 1: Understanding the XML Sitemap Structure

A standard xml file consists of the follow components.

1. XML declaration: This is a standard declaration for a xml file.
2. URLset: This serves as a wrapper for the url nodes.
3. URL Nodes: A url node is a declaration for a specific page address on the site and consists of the following 4 child nodes.
   • loc: The actual web address of a particular page
   • lastmod: The data the page was last modified in the format "yyyy-mm-dd"
   • changefreq: (optional) How often the page is updated always(changes each view),hourly,daily,weekly,monthly,yearly or never.
   • priority: (optional) Priority you assign this page relative to the rest of the site. A value in the range 0.0 - 1.1 (default 0.5).

As you can see it really is not that complicated to create a sitemap. Here is a simple sitemap listing the home page and a blog page.

Download Code Snippet

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
      xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
      http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
   <url>
        <loc>http://www.neiland.net/</loc>
      <lastmod>2011-03-05</lastmod>
      <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
      <priority>1</priority>
   </url>
   <url>
        <loc>http://www.neiland.net/blog/</loc>
      <lastmod>2011-03-05</lastmod>
      <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>