Creating A Google Sitemap

Creating A Google Sitemap

Posted by manjonka under Internet Marketing, Web Site Design

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:

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.