Google Sitemapper

Step 1: Creating your Google Sitemaps with Google Sitemapper

You can set the required profile settings for page priority (set at Google's recommended 0.5 for most pages) and frequency of page changes. Different profiles can be created and saved for different websites if you require.

You can set what file types Google Sitemapper should index and specify what files or folders to ignore. Pages can be easily removed after the spidering is complete that you don't want to include in the sitemap you submit to Google. These could be thank you pages, help pages etc.

Individual page names can be taken from each page title tag or labelled as you choose.

Google Sitemapper will also produce an html version of the sitemap that you could use as a sitemap for visitors, if you don't already have a sitemap on your website. You can set the color scheme of the page and define text and link colors.

Once Google Sitemapper has created the sitemap you can modify the settings on individual pages as you want. For example for those pages on your site that you consider more important you could increase the priority above 0.5. For those pages you consider less important you could reduce the priority below 0.5.

Similarly you could modify the Change Frequency on some pages to daily whilst leaving other pages at weekly or monthly or at any of the other allowed settings shown on the drop down menu.

Once you are happy with your sitemap, Google Sitemapper saves both the html version and the sitemap.xml version to your PC.

The whole Google Sitemaps process is quick and easy.

Step 2: Upload the Google Sitemap to your Web Hosting space

Next you need to upload the sitemap.xml using FTP to your web server. You can place the sitemap.xml file either in the root directory with your web pages, or in any other publicly assessable folder. You can use an existing folder or create a new one.

Sidebar: A number of daily visitors to this site have been trying to find my sitemap.xml file on my web server. If you're that curious, you only have to join my Restricted Access Group and ask. But for those visitors who want to keep looking for it, all I can is it's not where you're looking, so please don't keep looking for it. Thanks !

Step 3: Register for a free Google Sitemaps Account

The next thing you need to do is sign up for a Google Sitemaps Account unless you already have a Google Account, say for Gmail, Groups, My Search History, Alerts, or Froogle.

You can register at Google Sitemaps

Step 4: Login to your Google Sitemaps Account

Access your Google Sitemaps Login

Click Add a Sitemap.

Enter the exact location of your Sitemap URL
Example: www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Or: www.yourdomain.com/newdirectory/sitemap.xml

Then click Submit URL and when complete Logout

Google will access your sitemap file from your web server and check it for format compliance and errors. Since your sitemap has been produced by Google Sitemapper it is format compliant, so if you followed these steps you should have no errors.

Google can take several hours before it accesses and processes your site map file, so you'll need to login again later to Google Sitemaps to check they have processed the file and accepted it . If by chance there are errors, you will need to correct them, upload the new sitemap.xml file to your web host and resubmit the file again to Google.

Step 5: Update Google Sitemaps when your site changes and Resubmit

When ever you add a new page or make changes to your website that you want to alert Google about, you must create a new sitemap.xml file which you can do using Google Sitemapper.

Once the new sitemap.xml file has been uploaded to your web server, you must login to your Google Sitemaps Account and Click on Resubmit.

Google will then reprocess the file as before.

Google Sitemaps Final Note:

Remember that the "Priority" setting is a relative priority. So, if you set every web page to 1.0 (highest priority) it means all your pages are equal, as if you'd set no priority at all.

If you exaggerate the web page "Change Frequency" or modify the last update tags, Google can easily flag your domain as providing unreliable data. If you play it straight you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Google has said it cannot guarantee they'll crawl or index all of your URLs they are still subject to Google's normal acceptance criteria, whatever that is ;-)

Click on Google Sitemapper for further details or to download this software

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