A Sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell search engines like Google about the organization of your site content. Search engines reference the site map file to better understand the content your website contains. You can create a site map in your online store using the “Feeds” functionality of Miva Merchant. As long as your store is Miva Merchant 9.6 or later, you should be able to find “Feeds” by clicking into “Marketing” and then click on the “Feeds” tab. Let's set up a new feed by clicking on this “New Feed” button. We need to give it a code and a name. For this example will use “google_ sitemap” and “google sitemap” for the name. For the feed module we want to select “Standard Sitemap Protocol” at which point the window will expand to show all of the settings for the site map feed. The option “Update robots.txt” is automatically checked. This let's search engine spiders know where to find your site map file when they crawl your site. Also, you can choose to notify Google or Bing that you have an updated site map file. By default the site map contains entries for “All active products in your store,” or you can choose to include “No product pages” or just “Available products” which only looks at products that are not assigned to any availability group. Same goes for categories. You can choose “None, active, or available.” You have the option to include or exclude products that are free and you have the option to include all of your standard Miva store pages by selecting this option here. Note that this intelligently ignores certain store pages that wouldn't make sense to be part of the site map such as the Change Password screen and the customer's Order History pages. You can set the priority level for all of your product URI’s, all of your category URI’s, and all of your Page URI’s as well; and you have the option to include non-canonical URI’s and archived URI’s. Although these are for advanced users in that improperly using these options could result in duplicate content in the eyes of search engines and that wouldn’t it be good for SEO.
Lastly, we have the “Last Modified Date” setting that helps let search engines understand how old the data is in your site map and you can set how often the site map should update with this “Change Frequency” drop down. We’ll leave it to “Weekly” and then click on the “Add” button. Now that we have a feed created we can use this feed to generate a sitemap file for us. Let's select the feed we created and then click on the “Process Now” button. We’ll get a message letting us know when the process is complete and then we can just close out of this. We now have a site map in our store. We can view the site map by double-clicking into the Site Map Feed and we'll see a link in this window called “View Site Map.” Click on it and it will take you to your newly-created sitemap.xml file. And that's how you create a site map in Miva Merchant.