Where is the best place to put a sitemap for a site with local content?

[jcgoodrich]

I have a simple site that has cities as subdirectories (so URL is root/cityname). All of my content is localized for the city. My "root" page simply links to other cities. I very specifically want to rank for "topic" pages for each city and I'm trying to figure out where to put the sitemap so Google crawls everything most efficiently.

I'm debating the following options, which one is better?

1. Put the sitemap on the footer of "root" and link to all popular pages across cities. The advantage here is obviously that the links are one less click away from root.

2. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" (e.g. root/cityname) and include all topics for that city. This is how Yelp does it. The advantage here is that the content is "localized" but the disadvantage is it's further away from the root.

3. Put the sitemap on the footer of "city root" and include all topics across all cities. That way wherever Google comes into the site they'll be close to all topics I want to rank for.

Thoughts? Thanks!

[SharewarePros]

Hello,

You should include your sitemap.xml on the root of the site, it should include all pages crawleable from the root.

Also I recommend on your robots.txt file include the line: Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

This xml file is one of your most important files to rank well.

Hope it help

Claudio