A website’s sitemap has a practical and essential use. It makes it easier for visitors to visit through and navigate the website. The navigational help ensures that they do not get lost and that they will not have to look futilely for the information or page that they need. A visitor who immediately finds the information that he needs quickly in a website has a higher chance of coming back for another visit.

Many website administrators, designers and webmasters do not fully exploit the uses and benefits of having a good sitemap. For most of them, merely providing a list of links that do not really give a good service to visitors to the website is more than adequate. For them, as long as spiders can find the pages in their website then they are content. But wouldn’t it better if you can design a sitemap page that is not only big help to your visitors but also adds value to your website?

The characteristic of a good sitemap is that each link has an accompanying description about the target page for each link. This helps visitors who go to your site and would rely on it in navigating through your webpages.

Let’s look at two examples:

Example 1

Link with no description

Rock music

Example 2

Link with description

Rock music, the history of British rock music, From the Beatles to the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Duran Duran, U2, The best British bands and rock acts in history. Trace how rock music in Britain evolved.

There is a definite difference between these two examples. From a mere cursory look at the two examples it is obviously apparent that the second example is far more effective in giving the proper information to visitors. Website visitors are more likely to appreciate the kind of listing illustrated in Example No. 2. This is because most people are more at home with a search engine style listing because it is easier to navigate. No one would like to visit a website and see a sitemap presented similarly to the first example because there is a complete lack of information.

There is also an added benefit to making a descriptive sitemap. It helps in raising your search engine ranking.

By building your sitemap in such a way that you put all the links to related pages on each sitemap page, you are making, in effect, a themed sitemap page. Let us say that you have 7 pages that all relate to British rock music, by putting it all together you make a British rock music themepage. This kind of page will have the element a search engine considers is essential for a high ranking web page: keyword rich text.

It pays to make a good sitemap. Making a conscious effort to make one will bring great benefits to your website.

Philip Nicosia is the webmaster of XML-Sitemaps.com which provides a free sitemap generator which produces sitemaps in XML format for Google together with Yahoo sitemaps and a HTML site map for human visitors.

Technorati Tags: sitemap page, website navigation, website visitors, SEO

This article will discuss the benefits of implementing this
new technology, who should use it, how it works and how to
create a Google Sitemap for your web site.

Benefits of having a Google Site Map

1. Speeds up the discovery and addition of your web pages
in the Google index.

2. Enables Google to quickly find web pages that have been
recently changed.

3. A method for your site to be listed and appear quickly
in Google.

4. Helps Google to keep search content fresh, so people
have the most up to date information available.

Who should use Google Sitemaps?

All site owners can use Google sitemaps whether you have
one page or millions of pages, however it’s mostly geared
towards people that make frequent changes to their web
pages.

Normally web pages on a large site will not all get indexed
because the links are too deep within the site. By
including all your pages in the Google Sitemap you have a
better chance of them all being indexed as Google thrives
on fresh content. According to Google, it won’t increase
your site’s rankings.

How does it work?

Google sitemaps are created using XML (Extensible Markup
Language). This is a coding language similar to HTML(though
a little more complex). It is often used these days in
syndicated feeds or blogs.

Here is the sample XML code you would include for each page
of your site:

<.url><.br>
<.loc>http://www.yoursite.com/<./loc>
<.lastmod>2005-07-15
<.changefreq>monthly<./changefreq>
<.priority>0.5<./priority>
<./url>

(remove periods for code to work)

Here is a breakdown of what each line represents:

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

last modified – when you last modified the page.

change frequency – tells Google how often you modify that
particular page, whether it’s never, weekly, daily, hourly,
monthly or yearly.

priority – sets the priority you want Google to place for
that page on 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. Certain pages on your site may have more
significance than others because they are updated more
often ie home page, articles page.

How to Create a Dynamic Google SiteMap XML File

It would take a long time to create your Google Sitemap by
hand especially if you have a site that contains 1000s of
pages.

Fortunately Google provides the Sitemap Generator that
allows you to generate a sitemap very quickly. It’s a
Python script that creates a Sitemap for your site using
the Sitemap Protocol. This script can create Sitemaps
from URL lists, web server directories, or from access
logs.

You can read more about it here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Other Sitemap Generators.

Google has also compiled a list of third party generators.

Personally I use the free sitemap generator
It’s simple to use and quickly produces the necessary
XML code for your site.

Here are the steps on how to create your Sitemap using this
free Sitemap Generator:

1. Go to http://www.sitemapspal.com and enter your site’s
address.
2. Copy the code that it generates for your site and paste
it into notepad.
3. Save the text file as sitemap.xml
4. Upload this file to the root directory (same place as
your home page) of your web server.
5. Open up a Google Site Map account and submit
your site’s address.
6. Every time you modify a page or pages, login to your
Google account and click on the resubmit button.
7. Repeat this procedure for all of your web sites.

Conclusion

Google is still the largest and most accessed search engine
on Net. Each year millions of web sites get added to Google
making your site harder to find. Creating a Google Sitemap
will help your web pages stay fresh in Google’s index.

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)
owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com.
Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hosting.
You can read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles

Technorati Tags: google sitemaps, SEO, search engines, sitemap generators

The Google Sitemap program has become very popular because it made the task of submitting web pages to Google so much easier. A web developer or designer does not even have to worry about aking frequent changes to the web pages because it is more easily known by Google. By presenting a constantly fresh index of web pages for your web site you are assured that what is presented in Google is the latest pages that you are maintaining.

The very high popularity of Google Sitemap has encouraged Google’s team of engineers to develop and add more features to the program. These additions seek to make Google Sitemaps more intuitive and effective in its functions.

Google recently announced that it has again added a bevy of new features for the Google Sitemap program that just made certain aspects of the program so much easier to understand and maintain.

Here are the latest new features of the Google Sitemap program:

Query Stats. Knowing the top position of your website is important. With Google’s Query Stats, you will now know the top search queries where the results included your website as well as those that Google searchers actually clicked on. The position given is the average statistic posted over the last three weeks.

Top mobile search queries. Google acknowledges that there is a growing number of people who use mobile devices for browsing the internet and also consider it as a separate “demographic”. For this reason, the top mobile search queries feature shows web designers and developers the top search queries made from mobile devices in which the results showed their website. Web designers and web developers will see both the mobile searches of all web sites as well as the mobile searches of mobile-specific web sites. The results given by this feature will only appear if it is available in your web site. At this point of the development of this feature, Google only shows the top search queries and not the clicks made for those queries.

Downloading Sitemap details, statistics, and errors. Your Sitemap account now also contain additional information. You can now download information in the form of a comma separated value file. This type of file can be opened by using any text editor or spreadsheet program. You can decide to download the information on a per table basis, or you can opt to download Sitemap details, errors or statistics for all of the web sites in your Google Sitemaps account in one convenient file.

Philip Nicosia is the webmaster of XML-Sitemaps.com which provides a free site map generator which produces sitemaps in XML format for Google together with
Yahoo site maps and HTML sitemaps for human visitors.

Technorati Tags: google sitemaps, web search, sitemap program, seo

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:

< url>

< loc>http://www.yoursite.com/< / loc>

< priority>1.0< /priority>

< lastmod>2005-07-03T16:18:09+00:00< /lastmod>

< changefreq>daily< /changefreq>
< /url>

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. But lets look at Three ways to generate your XML file.

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

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 your server. Run the generator to get
your XML sitemap file and send it to Google.
PHP Generator

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:
Google’s List of Third Party Generators

One of the easiest to use is 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.

To learn more about the different Services and Programs offered
by Google click here: Google Adsense & Google Adwords

Copyright © 2005 Titus Hoskins of http://www.bizwaremagic.com

Technorati Tags: xml pages, google sitemaps, php generator, xml file, xml generator

Just register for a Yahoo name and log in to the Site Explorer (https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/). Validate your site just like you did with Google. Now click on the “manage” button left hand side of your site link, this is where you submit your sitemap.xml. Submit your feeds here also, same as the sitemap. Everything you submit here must be in the parent domain, but Yahoo allows you to submit sub domains which you are able to verify.

A little known fact about Yahoo is that they still utilize the urllist.txt protocol also. This is a simple text document containing all of your complete URLs on the domain, excluding any blocked by robots.txt. A good rule of thumb is to use the exact URLs from your sitemap.xml. No descriptions, one per line and no grammar. Save this file as urllist.txt and upload it to your site’s root. Now you can submit it in your Yahoo Site Explorer the same as the feeds. I always knew Yahoo still did this, but I only learned last night how to actually submit it. Here (http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/siteexplorer/siteexplorer-37.html) is the page laying it out for you.

In the “manage” screen of your domain you will notice a resubmit button. Use this to “ping” Yahoo when you have updated the document. I would strongly advise you do not abuse this feature. They do crawl, so it’s not really necessary…. however if you were just recently crawled and do a serious content. or structure change then this tool is for you.

Melanie Prough [SEOCog.com]

Technorati Tags: sitemap submit, sitemap feeds, site explorer, submit feeds

First of all you should know what a Google Sitemap is not: a guarantee of getting high ranks in the Google search engine positioning results or higher PageRanks. A Sitemap is not a tool that forces Google robots to crawl on demand, but a tool that makes the crawler more effective by providing a clear structure of your website.

Now let’s take a look at the benefits of Google Sitemaps:

Google Sitemaps is a tool that helps Google index web pages faster. You don’t (and should never) submit your site to Google, but your Sitemap. This Sitemap tells Google about the most important web pages of your website and how often you change them. Basically you help Google crawl your pages smarter.

You can see how Google indexes your website, whether there are crawl errors or not, which of your pages are indexed by Google, how many pages refer to your website and how many link to your website, etc. You will notice that Google shows fewer links than, let’s say Yahoo! That’s because Google has other algorithms and other relevancy queries.

Google Sitemaps and the Google Searcher

You can submit up to 200 sitemaps, so there are some limitations. However, this free Google service has already proved its efficiency and you should really consider using it, at least for the Google Sitemap statistics. Even if you don’t submit a Sitemap you’ll still be able to see what queries and keywords people use when they find your website. You’ll get results from the top searches, top searches from mobile devices and top searchers from the mobile web.

You’ll know whether people find you for the keywords you have been targeting or for other keywords. This will help you optimize your content. If most of your visitors find your website for only one or two fractions of your content – let’s say home-made wine – that’s an important niche and you should probably consider expanding its content to keep visitors interest.

Conclusion: Google Sitemaps is also a tool that enables you to see what’s going on in the mind of a Google searcher.

Google Sitemaps and Page Statistics

Another great advantage is that you no longer need to purchase expensive software to analyze your pages. Google’s page analysis displays some important keyword information: you’ll be able to see what words are most common on your website and what in the anchor text of the links that point to your website.

Google is also reporting on how it crawls your pages. If Google fails at it, you’d definitely want to know about it: to get them properly indexed, you need your pages to be linked and set up correctly. Once Google discovers the errors, they will appear in the page statistics. All you need to do is fix those errors.

Scott Lindsay is a web developer and entrepreneur. He is the founder of HighPowerSites and many other web projects. HighPowerSites is the easiest do-it-yourself website builder on the web. No programming or design skill required. Get your own website online in just 5 minutes with HighPowerSites.com at: http://www.highpowersites.com

Technorati Tags: google sitemaps, seo, sitemap program, linking