Placing Appropriate Files on Root Directory...

Here we will cover files that are required to uploaded at Root Directory of web site and how these are helpful in SEO. We will discuss Robots.txt, URLlist.txt, info.txt and sitemap.XML.

Sitemap

Site-map acts an abstract part of your web site just like index of book. It contains all the websites pages URLs and can exist in different format like: XML, Text or HTML site-map.
Each has its own purpose some are meant for search engines and other are meant for human visitors.
Like XML and Text site-maps are best suited for Google and Yahoo search engines for better indexing of your web site.
HTML Site-maps are created in perfect attractive way so that any visitor can find out any web page on your site easily, these graphical site-maps contains all the pages of your site or you can say entire navigation of your whole website is placed here Human friendly format for visitors ease to navigate throughout website.

1. Sitemap.xml:- An xml sitemap has following basic information:

URL
Location: www.Domain.com
Priority: 0 to 1.0
Date: 2007-10-05T16:16:09+00:00
Change Frequency: daily, weekly, monthly, yearly

We can create them manually or one can use various on line tools available to generate them. Once you have done with xml sitemap file upload it at root directory of web site.
Perfect sitemaps helps to acieve fast indexing of your web site.

2. URLlist:- This text file includes all the urls available in particular website in text format. Sometimes also reffered as textual site-map of web site. Yahoo gives special intention to this text site-map deep indexing your web site.
You can create it manually by inserting one URL per line in text file or take help of online free tools. Again upload this file urllist.txt on Root directory of site.

3. Robots.txt:- This text file is specially meant for Spiders and mostly includes the various areas of your website that you don't want to get crawled by the various spiders or search engines.
File consist of different commands/instruction that will instruct Spiders to crawl your website.
Like if you have done some redirect then you can put specific code here in this file to indicate spiders to crawl redirected page.
You can allow spiders to crawl your site-map through robots.txt by placing following code in file:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

This file robots.txt is also uploaded on Root directory of site.

4. Info.txt:- This text file includes very basic information about your website. Like :
url:
site_owner:
address:
city:
state:
country:
postal_code:
phone_number:
display_email:
site_name:
Title:
site_description:

This file is also uploaded on Root directory of site.

Thanks
SEO & Internet Marketing Specialist