SEOMoz's Crawl Diagnostics showing an error where the Title is missing on our Sitemap.xml file?

[LewisSellers]

Hi Everyone,

I'm working on our website Sky Candle and I've been running it as a campaign in SEOmoz. I've corrected a few errors we had with the site previously, but today it's recrawled and found a new error which is a missing Title tag on the sitemap.xml file.

Is this a little glitch in the SEOmoz system? Or do I need to add a page title and meta description to my XML file.

http://www.skycandle.co.uk/sitemap.xml

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I didn't think I'd need to add this.

Kind Regards

Lewis

[RyanKent]

The crawl tool alerts you to issues which you may want to address. In this instance, the issue is a legitimate concern which should be corrected.

You offer a link to your sitemap.xml file in your footer. It can be helpful to offer a HTML sitemap to your site's visitors, but not a XML file. Either remove the link, or modify it to a HTML link.

[Hurf]

This question has been raised here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/title-tag-on-sitemap-xml

You don't want a link to an XML sitemap - rather a HTML sitemap (as Ryan states)

You can use a tool like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com to generates sitemaps in both xml and html formats. HTML being the one to display on your website and the XML installed into the root directory www.skycandle.co.uk/sitemap.xml

I have generated one for you here for you to see - of course generate another if you want to change the parameters.

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/details-www.skycandle.co.uk.html

Don't worry about the XML sitemap too much as these aren't essential on smaller sites if all the pages of your site are indexing OK - as they should be picked up without the need to direct Search Engines them if the site has a clearly navigable structure.

Take a look at these articles for additional info http://www.seomoz.org/blog/xml-sitemaps-guidelines-on-their-use

and

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/expert-advice-on-google-sitemaps-verify-but-dont-submit

Of course the HTML sitemap is a useful tool for quick naviagation of your site and will improve your visitors experience on your site.