Google Sitemaps

If you read " Google Sitemaps 7 Benefits You Can't Ignore " you'll want to start using Google Sitemaps. All we need do now is create one.

If you don't want to know anything about the format of a Google Sitemaps file then you can skip the next part and go straight to the Google Sitemapper software.

If you've not already done so, you can read about the benefits in Google Sitemaps 7 Benefits You Can't Ignore

The Google sitemaps file is an xml file called would you believe, sitemap.xml. It can also be created as a plain text file, but the UTF-8 character set must be used.

This is not the default character set used in most common text editors, so exercise care using a text editor on this file.

The XML sitemap file needs to contain a list of website URL's along with information about each URL in a special format. The information in the file is :

URL of each page : Must begin with the protocol (such as http) and end with a trailing slash, if required by the web server. It must be less than 2048 characters in length.

The date of last modification of the page : The date is in ISO 8601 format and allows you to omit the time portion and use YYYY-MM-DD, if desired.

How frequently the page is likely to change. This does not mean the search engine will crawl the page according to the value you set. Valid values are:

always
hourly
daily
weekly
monthly
yearly
never

The value "always" is used to indicate pages that change every time they're accessed. The value "never" is used for archived URLs. These values are advisory and the crawler can choose to ignore them.

The priority of each URL specified in the range 0.0 to 1.0. This has no effect on the priority of your pages compared to pages on other sites. It advises the crawler which of your pages you consider more or less important than other pages on your site.

" Priority " is a relative value and will enable the crawler
to prioritize the order in which it will crawl your pages

The default priority of a page is 0.5.

Do not assign a high priority to all the URLs on your site, it will not help you. In fact it could harm you since if all pages are priority 1 the crawler will treat them all the same.
In effect none of your pages will have priority over any other pages on your site which is not what you want.

" Priority " does not affect the ranking position of pages in search results.

There are a number of methods you can use to create a Sitemap using either scripts that run on your web server or desktop based software running on your PC.

Google has a Sitemap Generator based on an open source project which runs on a server. However setting it up is not for the inexperienced or the faint hearted.

For the highly technically minded it's possible to setup a script on your web server that monitors site changes and automatically resubmits your sitemap to Google. There are some 3rd party scripts around but they're not guaranteed to work on all web servers.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/goog-sitemapgen
http://www.tm-research.com/products/google-sitemap/sitemap-generator.html

You can also use a web-based generator that will only locate pages on your website that are linked from the initial page you specify.

http://www.my-google-sitemap.com/google-sitemap.asp
http://www.tarrantit.com/googlesitemap

For the less technically minded, an XML file can be submitted manually to Google whenever there's new site content to crawl and that's the method I prefer.

To create the XML sitemap I use PC based software. Two recent applications I found are " Secret Spider Generator " at $97 and Google Sitemapper for $27.

As Google Sitemapper is from a software house I trust and have bought many other good software products, coupled with exceptional value at only $27, my choice was largely a no brainer.

Using Google Sitemapper to create Sitemaps is covered in Google Sitemapper

Tony Simpson
Making Your Website Work for You

W3C HTML 4.01 Compliant