How would I best make this SEO_able?

Question

I have a search engine that searches albums. For each music album, I have a page.

So, the work flow goes like this:

1. People search for music titles
2. The search engine displays a list of albums.
3. People click on an album to go to a details page.

I want google to index my front page and the details page. I want the details page to be highly ranked. How can I build a sitemap for this?

By the way, I have about 5 million albums (but I want the top 1000 ones to be highly ranked on google)

Answer 1

You would not use a sitemap for that many results. You would want each album to appear as a page with a unique URI to reference that page. That way the search engine can crawl your site by crawling links since search bots cannot submit form data. Each of those URIs should be simple, meaning limited to this part of the URI syntax:
scheme://authority_segment/path

Program your web application to remove and throw away any extraneous data, such as query string or parameters. If you do this you have to be sure that you are watching for URI poisoning or SQL injection even through means of character encoding.

Answer 2

How can I build a sitemap for this?

By pulling the addresses out of your database and creating a XML file with a high priority for some selected pages. Somehow I think that isn’t your real question …

Answer 3

If I wanted to automate building a site map for a site like this, I'd employ Python. I'd pretty much write everything from the ground up (except the data store access). The format is quite simple.

I'm not sure I quite understand your question...