Summary

This lesson started out this part of the book with somewhat of an unlikely topic, the optimization of web sites with respect to search engine web crawlers. Of course, XML factored heavily into the discussion as it forms the basis of Google's Sitemaps service that allows you to seed Google's web crawler with information about the pages on your web site. You not only learned how Google Sitemaps works and how it can help you, but you also learned how the XML-based Sitemap protocol language is structured. From there, you created a Sitemap by hand and then learned how to validate it and submit it to Google for processing. After you learned how to create a Sitemap the hard way, I shared with you a much easier technique that involves generating Sitemap documents automatically using online tools. Hopefully you've left this hour with a practical web trick up your sleeve to try out on your own web sites.