by BrentDPayne

How to Create Google Sitemaps in 7 Easy Steps

In case you haven’t heard of Google Sitemaps (BETA), it is a new program set up by Google to encourage webmasters to create a special XML-format sitemap file for Google to spider through. If you go through the official page, you will find yourself boggled if you are not very good at programming.

Thankfully, here’s a very simple method for you to create such a sitemap in 7 easy steps so you don’t have to spend on some software that purports to do the same thing automatically. You betcha, people are charging a premium for doing the thing which you can without taking out your wallet.

So, to create a Google sitemap:

1) Create an xml sitemap at http://www.sitemapspal.com.

2) Simply type in your url address and click submit.

3) Copy and paste the code into a new HTML file and save it as sitemap.xml.

4) FTP it to your host.

5) Go here to log in if you already have an account: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login using the same username and password as you would to log in to GMail. Ask for invitation.

6) Inform Google about your sitemap location using the HTTP request, like this: www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.gz and wait!

7) After 10-24 hrs, do your URL search on Google.com. Index page should be picked up.

by hjl

Google Sitemaps Just Got Better

Having a Google Sitemap just got better! Not only does the
search engine company check your sitemap, but now they give you
feedback! The new feature was quickly noticed by many users of
the service recently as a way for Google to alert the webmaster
about possible problem pages that they have had trouble
indexing.

I had the wonderful experience of getting to know this service
first hand when I logged in to Google Sitemaps to check on the
status of one of my many sitemaps. Along side of the address for
the sitemap, there was a link with the anchor text “verify”.
This helps Google to know that you are the actual webmaster for
that site and is a wonderful addition for security.

Once you are verified (which is a simple process of creating a
page on your root directory that they will see) you are able to
see the stats for the site index. Often times, you won’t see
anything in the stats area, but if you have recently updated,
redesigned, or deleted certain pages that Google has in its
index, you have a good chance of seeing something there. Google
will tell you about possible errors in the indexing process such
as pages that are not showing, or pages that they can’t see.

You might already be familiar with the new Google Sitemap
Program, but if you aren’t here’s a quick synopsis. The Sitemaps
program is a new offering from the Google family and is
currently in beta testing.

The goal of the program is to allow Google to see the complete
sitemap or a sitemap of frequently changing pages. This is
extremely helpful if you have links that can’t be reached by the
Googlebot when it’s indexing your page due to things like Java
script menus and such. The codes on a page that prevent the bot
from viewing your site ultimately hinder you in the search
engines.

So using the XML standard coding language, which is easy to
understand once you get the hang of it, you create a log of the
various pages on your site and tell Google some attributes about
it such as the overall priority of the page, how frequently you
alter the content, when the page was updated last, and of course
its location.

This will give Google the overall picture of the layout of your
site and does help in getting the pages indexed for greater
relevancy. There are protocols for the creation of the sitemap
so it’s best to read all the information completely at the
Google Sitemaps website at http://www.google.com/webmasters/ .

by BrentDPayne

Using a Site Map Builder When Adding Google Sitemaps to Websites

Using a site map builder to add Google sitemaps to your website can be very beneficial. With Google sitemaps, you can inform search engines when you have new or updated content. This process allows search engines to more intelligently crawl your site, significantly reducing the amount of time it normally takes to index your pages. A site map builder is especially beneficial for any site with pages that are only accessible through a search.

The best part about sitemap protocol is that once it is in place, the submission process will be fully automated, giving you more time to concentrate on other aspects of your website. Smart webmasters love Google sitemaps because they can increase traffic without having to do a great deal of work.

Getting Started
If you are interested in adding Google sitemaps to your website, the first thing you will want to do is study the free tutorials that are available on the Google website. These tutorials can walk you through the entire process and answer almost any question you might have.

Your next step will be installing a Google sitemap generator. There are many different site map builder programs out there that will help you generate the sitemap. Some builders can also help you create an rss feed, an html sitemap, and other url submission lists.

Creating Google Site Maps
There are several things you will want to keep in mind when creating Google sitemaps. A sitemap must begin with an opening urlset tag and end with a closing urlset tag. It must also include a url entry for each url and a loc child entry for each url parent tag.

Another important rule to note is that sitemaps should be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed. They should also contain fewer than 50,000 urls. Anything more, and you will need to create multiple sitemap files.

If all of this sounds confusing to you, a site map builder will come in very handy. This program can take care of the trickier, and more time consuming portions of creating sitemaps.

Placing and Submitting Sitemaps
The best spot to put your sitemap is at the root directory of your html server. Once your sitemap is in place, you can validate the xml structure with one of the many free online sitemap validation programs. Validating now can save you from submission errors and a huge headache later on.

The final step is to submit your sitemap. To do this, you will need to sign up for a free Google account or sign in on your existing account if you already have one. Only first time submissions require the access of a Google account; resubmits have many other options.

Once your Google sitemaps have been accepted, you will notice your pages being indexed much faster. You may also see an increase in traffic. If you want to keep check on stats, you can request daily crawler reports. You may also be able to utilize follow up measures through your site map builder.

This vid-bit will help you create your Google Site Map and submit it to Google.

by mtlin

Google Sitemaps – How important are they?

There is no denying that Google is the king of the hill when it comes to search engines. A fairly decent page ranking in Google is worth so much more than a better showing in other less prominent search engines. The reason for this is the overwhelming popularity of Google. A vast majority of internet users use Google’s services in looking for quality content on the internet. With the large number of people using it, a high page rank acts a great advertising opportunity for your website.

Because of the astounding amount of websites that submit their web pages to Google, the think tanks at Google decided to come out with Google Sitemaps. This service, which was started in June 2005, makes web page submissions to Google much easier but with the added bonus of getting detailed reports regarding the submitted page’s visibility in Google. With Google Sitemaps webmasters can continually inform Google about their web pages as well as any changes that they make to help improve their standing in Google. This program serves as complementary service to Google’s regular crawl, although it is considered that using Google Sitemaps can do a better job than the regular crawl.

Google decided to come out with the Google Sitemaps program as a way for the search engine to offer better search results to its users. With the current limitations of web crawling, usually not all pages are discovered. It is also difficult to determine if a page has changed. With so many uncontrollable variables, crawlers sometimes just make guesses. With Google Sitemaps it becomes easier to get a better picture of all the possible URLs in a website as well as the frequency of the changes that are made. Knowing these variables makes searching in Google a more robust and fruitful experience because users are assured that they always get a fresh index of web pages.

To take advantage of the Google Sitemap program, webmasters only need to download a free open-source tool called Sitemap Generator that helps in creating a Sitemap using the Sitemap protocol. Google hopes that webservers will eventually support the protocol so that webmasters will not take any other extra steps to in order to join the program.

Google Sitemaps also freely accepts codes taken from or generated by third party providers and even lists down all of the available third party software within the Google Sitemap pages.

XML-Sitemaps.com is one such provider that provides a free Google sitemaps generator for webmasters which will also produce a HTML site map.

Google’s software and service developers are continually tweaking and improving the Google Sitemap program to better address the needs of webmasters. Because of this, new features are continually added to the Sitemap program.

Some of the new features that have been incorporated now revolve around the reporting aspect of Google Sitemap.

When a site has been verified, Google can show webmasters the statistics and errors about the website as well as the web pages. Among the information that would be included are:

The URLs that Google had trouble crawling including the reason why. Also included are the top queries that resulted in returns from their websites as well as those that brought traffic to their sites.

The web page’s PageRank distribution

The common text in external anchors that other websites used to link to their websites.

These new features, as well as others that are still being developed, brings tremendous advantages for webmasters because it makes the task of running a website so much easier. It also simplifies certain tasks that webmasters need to do to better manage their website’s page ranking. Ultimately, it gives their websites better exposure as well as the inclusion of more of their web pages in Google’s index.

by Colin ZHU

Google Sitemaps Explained – How To Use Google Sitemaps

Three Ways To Index Your Site With Google Sitemaps [Difficult,
Hard, And Easy]

Google has recently implemented a program where any webmaster
can create a Sitemap of their site and submit it for indexing by
Google. It is a quick and easy way for you to keep your site
constantly indexed and updated in Google.

The program is appropriately called Google Sitemaps.

In order for you to best use Sitemaps, you must have an XML
generated file on your site that will transmit or send any
updates, changes, and data to Google. XML (Extensible Markup
Language)is everywhere these days, you have probably seen the
orange XML logo on many web sites and its often associated with
Blogging because Blogs use XML/RSS feeds to syndicate their
content.

Today RSS is known mostly as ‘Really Simple Syndication’ but its
original acronym stood for ‘Rich Site Summary’. XML is only
simple code like HTML and it is used to syndicate your content
to all interested parties.

And the interested party in this case is Google. By creating
Sitemaps, Google is really asking webmasters to take charge of
the indexing and updating of their sites. Basically, doing the
Googlebot’s job!

This is a ‘Good’ thing! With the steady influx of new web sites
growing rapidly, indexing all this material will become a
challenge, even with the resources of Google. With Sitemaps,
websmasters can now take charge and make sure their site is
crawled and indexed.

Please note, indexing your site with Sitemaps WON’T improve your
rankings in Google. You will still be competing with the other
sites in Google for top positions. But with Sitemaps you can
make sure all your pages are crawled and indexed quickly by
Google.

There are some other big advantages of using Google’s Sitemaps -
mainly you have control over a few key variables, attributes or
tags. To explain this as simply as possible, your XML powered
sitemap file will have this simple code for each page of your
site:

http://www.yoursite.com/ 1.0 2005-07-03T16:18:09+00:00 daily

Along with ‘urlset’ tags at the beginning and end of your code,
and an XML version indication – that’s basically your XML file!
File size will depend on the number of webpages you have.

Taking a closer look at this XML file:

location – http://www.yoursite.com – name of your webpage

priority – you set the priority you want Google to place on that
page in your site. You can prioritize your pages: 0.0 being the
least, 1.0 being the highest, 0.5 is in the middle. This is ONLY
relative to your site. It will not affect your rankings. Why is
this important? You have certain pages on your site that are
more important than others, (home page, high profit page, opt-in
page, etc.) by placing high priority on these pages, you will
increase their importance in Google.

last modified – when you last modified that page, this timestamp
allows crawlers to avoid recrawling pages that haven’t changed.

change frequency – you can tell Google how often you change that
particular page. Never, weekly, daily, hourly, and so on – if
you frequently update your page this could be extremely
important.

Why do I need a XML Generator?

In order for this XML sitemap file on your site to be constantly
updated, you need a Generator that will spider your site, list
all the urls and automatically feed them to Google. Thus
constantly updating your site in Google’s massive index or
database. Keep in mind, Google also gives you the option of
submitting a simple text file with all your URLs.

Now there is already a flood of these generators popping up!
Different ways of generating your XML powered sitemap file. More
are probably appearing as you read this. For your convenience,
three ways to generate your XML Sitemaps file are listed below:

Difficult – Google’s Python Generator

That’s a relative term, if you know your server like the back of
your hand and installing scripts doesn’t scare the bejesus out
of you, you’re probably smiling at the word difficult. Google
supplies a link to a generator which you can download and set up
on your server. It will cough up your sitemap XML file and
automatically feed it to Google. Google XML Generator

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/sitemap-

generator.html

In order for this Generator to work, Python version 2.2 must be
installed on your web server – many servers don’t have this. If
you know what you’re doing, this will probably be a good choice.

You don’t need a Google Account to use Sitemaps but it’s
encouraged because you can track your sitemap’s progress and
view diagnostic information. If you already have another Google
Account gmail, Google Alerts, etc. just use that one to sign in
and follow directions from there.

To submit your Sitemap using an HTTP request, issue your request
to the following URL:

www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

Hard – A PHP Code Generator

This is a php generator that you can place on your server. This
generator will spider your site, and produce your XML sitemap
file. Download the phpSitemapNG and upload it to your server.
Run the generator to get your XML sitemap file and send it to
Google. PHP Generator http://enarion.net/google/

Again, this is only hard to do if you don’t know your way around
PHP files or scripts.

Easy – Free Online Generator

These Generators are popping up everywhere, and Google now keeps
a list of these ‘third party suppliers’ of generators on their
site. Find them here: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

One of the easiest to use is http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and
you can index up to 500 pages with this online Generator very
quickly and it will give you the sitemap XML file Google needs
to index your site. It will go into your site, spider it and
index all your pages into an XML sitemap of your site. You can
download this file, Compressed or Non- compressed and make minor
changes such as setting the priority, changing frequency, etc.

Then upload this file to your site as sitemap.xml to the root
directory of your server i.e. where you have your homepage. Then
notify Google Sitemaps of your XML file and you’re in business.

Of course, the only drawback, if you constantly add pages to
your site you will need to also add these pages to your XML
sitemap file. This won’t be much of a problem unless you’re
daily adding pages to your site – then you will need something
like the PHP or Python generator to do all this for you
automatically.

Google is still the major search engine on the web so getting
your pages indexed and updated quickly is the major reason to
use Google Sitemaps. If you want your site to remain competitive
it’s probably the wisest route to take.

by eshm

SEO With Google Sitemaps

What is a Google Sitemap?

A Google Sitemap is a very simple XML document that lists all the pages in your website, but the Google Sitemaps program is actually much more important than that. In fact, the Sitemaps program provides a little peek inside Google’s mind – and it can tell you a lot about what Google thinks of your website!

Why Should You Use Google Sitemaps?

Until Google Sitemaps was released in the summer of 2005, optimizing a site for Google was a guessing game at best. A website’s page might be deleted from the index, and the Webmaster had no idea why. Alternatively, a site’s content could be scanned, but because of the peculiarities of the algorithm, the only pages that would rank well might be the “About Us” page, or the company’s press releases.

As webmasters we were at the whim of Googlebot, the seemingly arbitrary algorithmic kingmaker that could make or break a website overnight through shifts in search engine positioning. There was no way to communicate with Google about a website – either to understand what was wrong with it, or to tell Google when something had been updated.

That all changed about a year ago when Google released Sitemaps, but the program really became useful in February of 2006 when Google updated it with a couple new tools.

So, what exactly is the Google Sitemaps program, and how can you use it to improve the position of your website? Well, there are essentially two reasons to use Google Sitemaps:

Sitemaps provide you with a way to tell Google valuable information about your website

You can use Sitemaps to learn what Google thinks about your website

What You Can Tell Google About Your Site

Believe it or not, Google is concerned about making sure webmasters have a way of communicating information that is important about their sites. Although Googlebot does a pretty decent job of finding and cataloging web pages, it has very little ability to rate the relative importance of one page versus another. After all, many important pages on the Internet are not properly “optimized”, and many of the people who couldn’t care less about spending their time on linking campaigns create some of the best content.

Therefore, Google gives you the ability to tell them on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 how important a given page is relative to all the others. Using this system, you might tell Google that your home page is a 1.0, each of your product sections is a 0.8, and each of your individual product pages is a 0.5. Pages like your company’s address and contact information might only rate a 0.2.

You can also tell Google how often your pages are updated and the date that each page was last modified. For example your home page might be updated every day, while a particular product page might only be updated on an annual basis.

What Google Can Tell You About Your Site

Having the ability to tell Google all this information is important, but you don’t even need to create a sitemap file in order to enjoy some of the perks of having a Google Sitemaps account.

That’s because even without a Sitemap file, you can still learn about any errors that Googlebot has found on your website. As you probably know, your site doesn’t have to be “broken” for a robot to have trouble crawling it’s pages. Google Sitemaps will tell you about pages it was unable to crawl and links it was unable to follow. Therefore, you can see where these problems are and fix them before your pages get deleted from the index.

You can also get information on the types of searches people are using to find your website. Of course, most website analytics tools will give this information to you anyway, but if the tool you use doesn’t have this feature, then it’s always nice to get it for free from Google.

But the best part of the Sitemaps program is the Page analysis section that was added in February of 2006. This page gives you two lists of words. The first list contains the words that Googlebot associates with your website based on content on your site. The second list contains words that Googlebot has found linking to your site!

Unfortunately, Google limits the number of words in each list to 20. As a consequence, the inbound links column is partly wasted by words such as “http”, “www”, and “com” – terms that apply equally to all websites (hey Google, how about suppressing those terms from the report?). That said, this list does provide you with a way to judge the effectiveness of your offsite optimization efforts.

When you compare these two lists, you can get an understanding of what Google thinks your website is about. If the words on your Site Content column are not really what you want Googlebot to think about your site, then you know you need to tweak your website’s copy to make it more focused on your core competency.

If, on the other hand your inbound links don’t contain any keywords that you want to rank well for, then perhaps you should focus your efforts in that direction.

Above all else, you really want these two lists to agree. You want your inbound linked words to match up to the site content words. This means that Google has a clear understanding of the focus of your website.

Additional Benefits of the Sitemaps Program

Google has even started notifying Sitemaps-participating Webmasters if they are breaking any of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This can be very valuable information if your site suddenly becomes de-listed on Google and you don’t know why.

Only Sitemaps participants can get this information, and it is only provided at Google’s discretion. In fact, Google will NOT notify you if you are creating worthless websites that offer no original content, or if you are creating thousands of doorway pages that are redirecting to other web sites. Google doesn’t want to give the sp@ammers any clues as to how to improve their techniques.

How Do You Get Started with Google Site Maps?

The first thing you must do is obtain a Google Account. If you already have a Gmail, Adsense, or Adwords account, then you are all set. If not, you can register an account by visiting the Google Accounts page (https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount).

Building your sitemap file is pretty easy to do if you are familiar with XML, and if you aren’t you can always use a third-party tool such as the ones that are listed on Google’s website (http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html). Google also has a “Sitemap Generator” that you can download and install on your server, but unless you are fairly adept at managing Python scripts, you should probably stick to the third-party tools.

At any rate, once you have your Google Account and your Sitemap file built, the rest is very easy. All you have to do is:

Log into your account (http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview)

Type your website’s URL into the “Add Site” box and click on “OK”

Click on the Manage Sites link for the website you are adding, and add your sitemap file to your account.

Google Sitemaps – An Excellent SEO Tool

Google Sitemaps help Googlebot quickly find new content on your website. They allow you to tell Google what’s important, what’s new, and what changes often. The tools provided to webmasters through the program can play a vital role in helping you understand how the search engines (especially Google) view your website.

Using this information you can dramatically improve the position of your website and quickly clear up any issues Google finds. You can also use the tools provided by Google to gauge the effectiveness of your off-site optimization efforts so you can better focus your time and energy on activities that bring you the most success.

by BrentDPayne

Automated Google Sitemaps Generators

What is a Google Sitemap?

Google Sitemaps help Google’s search engine spider discover and index pages on your website. In its basic form, a Google Sitemap is a list of all the webpages on your website. When Google’s search engine spider reads this list, it then knows about all those webpages that are specified in the sitemap. Google Sitemaps come in two formats: xml sitemaps and text sitemaps. Both formats contain the addresses of all the webpages on your website. The XML version contains additional information about each webpage such as its last modification date and roughly how often it is updated.

How Does a Google Sitemap Help Me?

If your website does not have a Google Sitemap, Google’s search engine spider downloads a webpage from your website and scans through it looking for any links that it contains to other webpages in your website. Google’s spider then downloads all those newly discovered pages and repeats the process of scanning for links. Such download and scanning takes time. If you have a Google Sitemap, Google’s spider immediately knows about all the webpages on your website. Reading the Google Sitemap is considerably faster than having to download and scan each page. A Google Sitemap also helps if your webpages are not well linked together or not at all. In that case, without a Google Sitemap, it may take a while for some webpages to be discovered or discovered at all. Google Sitemaps eliminate that problem.

Does Google.com Index Everything?

The answer to that question is no. Google.com states, “we can’t guarantee that URLs from your Sitemap will be added to the Google index.” Even though Google.com does not guarantee that it will index everything that you specify in your Google Sitemap, a Google Sitemap should increase the opportunity that your webpages will be indexed sooner since Google will know about them sooner. If Google does not know about your webpages, they definitely will not be indexed.

If I Create a Sitemap Will It Hurt Me?

Google.com states, “In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it.” Google.com uses the information contained in your Google Sitemap to learn about the structure of your website and to better schedule its search engine spider in the scanning (a.k.a. crawling or spidering) of your website.

How Do I Generate a Google Sitemap?

There are several tools available that you use to create Google Sitemap. Google.com itself even provides a sitemap generator written in the Python programming language. There are also websites where you type in your website address and its spider goes and scans your website to determine all your webpages; however, such scanning is time consuming since every page on your website must be scanned, and the process must be initiated by you. A faster way of generating a Google Sitemap is to use Google Sitemap generator software that runs locally on your website.

How Can I Automate Google Sitemap Generation?

Creating sitemaps can be an automated process. The simplest way is to install and use the sitemap.pl Google Sitemap generator software. Once you install this software in your cgi-bin directory, the software will automatically generate the Google Sitemap each time it is accessed. This software is of the type whereby you can “set it and forget it”. You can go about adding to your website and you do not have to worry about updating your Google Sitemap. The software works by scanning your website’s hard drive looking for files to include in your Google Sitemap. By directly accessing the hard drive rather than downloading webpages, the software very quickly generates the Google Sitemap. On a typical server, the sitemap.pl sitemap generator software finds about 500 webpages per second (that’s 2 ms/page).

How Do I Tell Google.com About My Google Sitemap?

There are two ways that you can use to tell Google.com about your Google Sitemap. The first method is the simplest and the quickest to do. In your robots.txt file, include a line that says “sitemap:” followed by the website address of your Google Sitemap. For example, the Google Sitemap of the bime.com website is located at http://www.bime.com/sitemap.xml thus its robots.txt file contains a line that states, sitemap: http://www.bime.com/sitemap.xml The second method involves logging into Google.com Webmaster Tools at http://www.google.com/sitemaps and adding your site to the Sites Dashboard, and then submitting your Google Sitemap. Once you add your site, click the “Verify” link and follow the instructions and you will gain access to additional statistics about your website and status information about the processing of your Google Sitemap.

In Summary, What Do I Need to Do?

1. Use a Google Sitemap Generator such as sitemap.pl
2. Add your Google Sitemap to your robots.txt file.
3. Add your site to Google Webmaster Tools
4. Submit your Google Sitemap.

Having an Google Sitemap is a good first step to get your webpages indexed. And with an automated sitemaps generator, improve the possibility of your webpages being indexed and showing up in search engine results.