Original sitemap XML document:
<xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<urlset>
<url>
<loc>http://www.youronlineally.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-03-14</lastmod>
<changefreq>semi-monthly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.youronlineally.com/contact.php</loc>
<lastmod>2008-03-6</lastmod>
<changefreq>semi-monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
.
.
.
</urlset>
Site Maps & Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine programs from fully spidering (indexing) a site. To this end, the sitemap, an established institution to help visitors to a website find their way around, for Your Online Ally has been created using a search engine friendly XML document complying with the standards of the Sitemap protocol as defined at Sitemap.org. View the original XML file
A portion of the XML sitemap document is shown in the window to the right and while this is most definitely eye-candy for a spider crawling your site, providing a standards compliant road map to ensure your site's complete and accurate indexing, it doesn't do much for human visitors, does it? To improve the sitemap for human consumption an eXtensible Stylesheet Language XSL file is created which contains rules for formatting the XML file. View the original XSL file
The next part, XSL Transformations XSLT happens as a part of your browser. A compliant browser will render the XML file as Transformed by the XSL file. If you don't see any difference, you need to change browsers and I would recommend Firefox. | View resulting Website page
This is much better, but it's like looking at a naked (X)HTML page because that's exactly what it is. We know how to handle that; with CSS. If the XSLT results are passed to the website's CSS file we generate a page that appears the same as any other page on the website. So, here is the Your Online Ally site map in all it's glory. Better yet, because it's dynamically generated by the XML file, this page never needs to be updated when pages are added or deleted to the website. Even better than that, the XML file is automatically generated by an administrative PHP program insuring it's always up to date.