Google Sitemaps Explained - How to Get Your Site Indexed

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 it's 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 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 profït page, opt-ïn 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. Nevër, weekly, daily, hourly, and so on - if you frequently update your page this could be extremely important.

Why do I need an XML Sitemap 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.

There are loads of free XML sitemap generator software solutions around.

These Generators are popping up everywhere, and Google keeps a list of these 'third party suppliers' of generators on their site. Find them at: Google's List of Third Party Generators

One of the easiest to use is www.xm-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.

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