Web Hosting, Website Design, E-Business Information » generator http://www.web-hosting-reference.com Your Online Web Hosting Reference Thu, 08 Jul 2010 18:41:30 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Creating A Google Sitemap http://www.web-hosting-reference.com/web-site-design/creating-a-google-sitemap.html http://www.web-hosting-reference.com/web-site-design/creating-a-google-sitemap.html#comments Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:33:30 +0000 manjonka http://www.web-hosting-reference.com/?p=169 Adding a sitemap to your website is a great way to help Internet Search Engines find and quickly index your web pages. A sitemap can also provide a “Table of Contents” for your website visitors. There are however two distinct types of sitemap: one for the search engines and the other for human visitors. In this article, we will only focus on Search Engines Sitemap. Although the title of this post may be misleading, the  sitemap you will create can be used for all Search Engines not only Google.

Google Sitemap

This sitemap intended for the Search Engines is an XML file (Extensible Markup Language) . It has  a preset structure defining the URL, update frequency and crawl priority of each web page you would like to add in the search engine index.

That XML file format and structure is supported by all major Search Engines: Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask. In a nutshell an XML sitemap looks like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<?xml-stylesheet type=”text/xsl” href=”gss.xsl”?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″
xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”
xsi:schemaLocation=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd”>
<url>
<loc>http://www.web-hosting-reference.com</loc>
<lastmod>2010-04-13T01:38:06+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>1.00</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.web-hosting-reference.com/category/domain-name</loc>
<lastmod>2010-03-25T16:48:23+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
…
…
</urlset>

For those familiar with XML documents structure, you will notice:

  • the first line, as always, contains the XML declaration with its version and encoding type (<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>)
  • the second line specifies the stylesheet associate with the document for presentation purpose.
  • the third line is the root element (<urlset ….. > ….</urlset>) with the document’s namespace
  • then follow the <url>…</url> “child nodes” each containing its own child nodes as well.
  • <loc>..</loc> specifies the internet address (URL) of the web page
  • <lastmod>…</lastmod> encloses the full date and time that web page was last modified.
  • <changefreq>…</changefreq> defines the frequency you expect that web page will be changed/updated.
  • <priority>..</priority> assigns a crawl priority for each web page. It’s a number ranging from 0.0 to 1.o. The higher the priority the more important that web page will be in the “eyes” of the search engine regarding the crawling rate. In this example, I choose the home page as the highest priority (http://www.web-hosting-reference.com). The home page will be  therefore  crawled more often by Search Engines.

As you just learned, you can manually create a sitemap for search engines that is if your website contains just a few pages. All you have to is to keep adding <url>…</ul> nodes following the markup shown above until you include all your web pages.

However for larger web sites, you are better of  having this chore done by a  sitemap generator. It’s software program designed specifically for creating sitemaps. The advantages of using a sitemap generator are:
- real time saving
-  guarantee that you won’t miss any web page
- and error-free XML markup.

Sitemap Generator

You can find a free sitemap generator online by just typing “google sitemap generator” in your favorite Search Engine. All you need is to specify your website address (e.g. http://www.web-hosting-reference.com) and the program will handle the rest. Within a minute or two, you will have your sitemap file you can upload to your website then just point the Search Engines to it.

My favorite sitemap generator however  is “gsitecrawler”. It’s a desktop application by SOFTplus that allows you to create a Google sitemap (all search engines included) for a website of any size. The best part is it’s FREE. You can find the download link by just looking for it using the name above in your favorite Search Engine.

You can choose to exclude certain web pages you do not wish the search engines to index. You can also  exclude entire folders or let the program read your “robots.txt” file to determine which files/folders to exclude. This software even reports broken links and pages it cannot access for whatever reason, so you can investigate and fix the issue.

You can  automate the process so the software can recreate your sitemap at schedule dates then upload the file to your web hosting server. Did I also mention you can setup as many websites as you want in this software. It can be a very valuable tool for all of you webmasters out there.

Creating and submitting a sitemap to search engines should be part of your SEO and SEM campaign. On an upcoming article, I will show you how to submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask Search Engines.

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