SEO With Google Sitemaps

What is a Google Sitemap?

A Google Sitemap is a very simple XML document that lists all the pages in your website, but the Google Sitemaps program is actually much more important than that. In fact, the Sitemaps program provides a little peek inside Google's mind - and it can tell you a lot about what Google thinks of your website!

Why Should You Use Google Sitemaps?

Until Google Sitemaps was released in the summer of 2005, optimizing a site for Google was a guessing game at best. A website's page might be deleted from the index, and the Webmaster had no idea why. Alternatively, a site's content could be scanned, but because of the peculiarities of the algorithm, the only pages that would rank well might be the "About Us" page, or the company's press releases.

As webmasters we were at the whim of Googlebot, the seemingly arbitrary algorithmic kingmaker that could make or break a website overnight through shifts in search engine positioning. There was no way to communicate with Google about a website - either to understand what was wrong with it, or to tell Google when something had been updated.

That all changed about a year ago when Google released Sitemaps, but the program really became useful in February of 2006 when Google updated it with a couple new tools.

So, what exactly is the Google Sitemaps program, and how can you use it to improve the position of your website? Well, there are essentially two reasons to use Google Sitemaps:

1. Sitemaps provide you with a way to tell Google valuable information about your website

2. You can use Sitemaps to learn what Google thinks about your website

What You Can Tell Google About Your Site

Believe it or not, Google is concerned about making sure webmasters have a way of communicating information that is important about their sites. Although Googlebot does a pretty decent job of finding and cataloging web pages, it has very little ability to rate the relative importance of one page versus another. After all, many important pages on the Internet are not properly "optimized", and many of the people who couldn't care less about spending their time on linking campaigns create some of the best content.

Therefore, Google gives you the ability to tell them on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 how important a given page is relative to all the others. Using this system, you might tell Google that your home page is a 1.0, each of your product sections is a 0.8, and each of your individual product pages is a 0.5. Pages like your company's address and contact information might only rate a 0.2.

You can also tell Google how often your pages are updated and the date that each page was last modified. For example your home page might be updated every day, while a particular product page might only be updated on an annual basis.

What Google Can Tell You About Your Site

Having the ability to tell Google all this information is important, but you don't even need to create a sitemap file in order to enjoy some of the perks of having a Google Sitemaps account.

That's because even without a Sitemap file, you can still learn about any errors that Googlebot has found on your website. As you probably know, your site doesn't have to be "broken" for a robot to have trouble crawling it's pages. Google Sitemaps will tell you about pages it was unable to crawl and links it was unable to follow. Therefore, you can see where these problems are and fix them before your pages get deleted from the index.

You can also get information on the types of searches people are using to find your website. Of course, most website analytics tools will give this information to you anyway, but if the tool you use doesn't have this feature, then it's always nice to get it for free from Google.

But the best part of the Sitemaps program is the Page analysis section that was added in February of 2006. This page gives you two lists of words. The first list contains the words that Googlebot associates with your website based on content on your site. The second list contains words that Googlebot has found linking to your site!

Unfortunately, Google limits the number of words in each list to 20. As a consequence, the inbound links column is partly wasted by words such as "http", "www", and "com" - terms that apply equally to all websites (hey Google, how about suppressing those terms from the report?). That said, this list does provide you with a way to judge the effectiveness of your offsite optimization efforts.

When you compare these two lists, you can get an understanding of what Google thinks your website is about. If the words on your Site Content column are not really what you want Googlebot to think about your site, then you know you need to tweak your website's copy to make it more focused on your core competency.

If, on the other hand your inbound links don't contain any keywords that you want to rank well for, then perhaps you should focus your efforts in that direction.

Above all else, you really want these two lists to agree. You want your inbound linked words to match up to the site content words. This means that Google has a clear understanding of the focus of your website.

Additional Benefits of the Sitemaps Program

Google has even started notifying Sitemaps-participating Webmasters if they are breaking any of Google's Webmaster Guidelines. This can be very valuable information if your site suddenly becomes de-listed on Google and you don't know why.

Only Sitemaps participants can get this information, and it is only provided at Google's discretion. In fact, Google will NOT notify you if you are creating worthless websites that offer no original content, or if you are creating thousands of doorway pages that are redirecting to other web sites. Google doesn't want to give the sp@ammers any clues as to how to improve their techniques.

How Do You Get Started with Google Site Maps?

The first thing you must do is obtain a Google Account. If you already have a Gmail, Adsense, or Adwords account, then you are all set. If not, you can register an account by visiting the Google Accounts page (https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount).

Building your sitemap file is pretty easy to do if you are familiar with XML, and if you aren't you can always use a third-party tool such as the ones that are listed on Google's website (http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html). Google also has a "Sitemap Generator" that you can download and install on your server, but unless you are fairly adept at managing Python scripts, you should probably stick to the third-party tools.

At any rate, once you have your Google Account and your Sitemap file built, the rest is very easy. All you have to do is:

1. Log into your account (http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview)

2. Type your website's URL into the "Add Site" box and click on "OK"

3. Click on the Manage Sites link for the website you are adding, and add your sitemap file to your account.

Google Sitemaps - An Excellent SEO Tool

Google Sitemaps help Googlebot quickly find new content on your website. They allow you to tell Google what's important, what's new, and what changes often. The tools provided to webmasters through the program can play a vital role in helping you understand how the search engines (especially Google) view your website.

Using this information you can dramatically improve the position of your website and quickly clear up any issues Google finds. You can also use the tools provided by Google to gauge the effectiveness of your off-site optimization efforts so you can better focus your time and energy on activities that bring you the most success.

Matthew Coers is an Internet marketing expert. His website, ProfitChoice.com contains online courses designed to teach entrepreneurs how to build a website and make money online. Download his FREE Internet Marketing report, 7 Days to Website Success.

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Google Sitemaps (AKA Webmaster Tools) Tutorial For the Non-Geek, XML Challenged Site Owner

Google recently announced a change to their "Sitemaps" program. It went from a protocol meant for Python programmers and XML wizards to a much kinder, gentler (and friendlier to webmasters) program to help get all of your pages crawled and indexed. It's called "Google Webmaster Central. The tools can now be used and understood by most small business site owners.

Google explains everything and lists Sitemaps resources at:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

To use Google sitemaps, you must first sign up for a Google Account. If you already use Google Adwords, Analytics, Gmail or other Google provided tools, you can use your existing account to submit a Google sitemap for your site. Get an account at the following URL if you don't already use Google services:

https://www.google.com/accounts/

NON-PROGRAMMER SMALL BUSINESS WEBMASTERS WANT SIMPLICITY

Many webmasters struggle to understand even the simplest HTML and meta tags and after visiting the Sitemaps program page when it was first announced in the summer of 2005, those small business site owners went away sadly shaking their heads and mumbling. They complained, "I can't even add PERL scripts to my own CGI bin and properly set permissions on page files - how am I going to install and debug a Python script on my server, run cron jobs and generate XML files?"

Apparently Google heard all that grumbling and came back with the newly released "Webmaster Central" to answer the concerns of excess complexity. They no longer require you to be a geek to get all your pages into their index. They've created tools to make the job of submitting all of your pages for inclusion in their index very much easier to handle.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

The first listed "Site Status" tool lets you check indexing of your sites. If you enter an address into that search box and press the "Next" button, they'll return a page with a button labeled "Take me to Google Sitemaps" and encouraging use of the sitemaps tools, regardless of whether you've already submitted that sitemap or not. They'll list some minor details about the site entered such as:

Pages from your site are included in Google's index.

Some of these pages are indexed without a title or description.

Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Aug 18, 2006

They list "Potential indexing problems" and then state:

More details about your site may be available

By using Google Sitemaps, you can learn more details available only to site owners, such as:

o errors Googlebot encountered while crawling your site

o top search queries that return your site

GOOGLE SITEMAPS DIFFERENT FROM HTML SITEMAPS

Let's back up for a moment though. Webmasters have been told for ten years now to build a sitemap into their web site that lists all of their pages (if it is a small web site with under a hundred pages) or at least listing major sections of their site (if they have thousands or tens of thousands of pages.) So what is the difference here?

Google sitemaps are actually XML documents (not public html pages) that hold much more information about your web pages to help Google determine several things. They list the "priority" or importance, "last modified" dates, and "change frequency" of each page. But the creation of those documents had required webmasters to install that Python script on their server. Available at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=137793&package_id=153422

Or webmasters had to use third party software to generate the required XML file. Google recommends a brief list of sources for third party software to help them programmatically create the XML sitemaps:

http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

I've personally tried several of those third party tools and found two of the web-based sitemap generators lacking, one of the downloaded software tools crashed my computer (and created havoc for me), so what is a small business owner without programming skills to do?

Those business owners who are non-programmer types and want to use Google Sitemaps complained that Google was favoring geeks over business owners. They wanted a simple way to submit all of their pages to Google without running cron jobs on their server and debugging Python scripts.

PLAIN TEXT SITEMAPS FILES NOW ACCEPTED

Google heard our grumbling and now allows simple lists of URL's in a plain text document. All you have to do is create that list of page files, save it as sitemap.txt and upload it to your server. Then you log in to your Google Webmaster Central (AKA Sitemaps) account and tell them the URL of your sitemap text document.

Before you submit your first sitemap URL on a domain, Google requires you to put a "site verification" meta tag on your site home page and click a "Verify" button to prove you own the site. Anyone with a Google account and access to your server can do this. You can add or remove any authorization tags placed by anyone with access to your server who is no longer authorized to see this data.

WEBMASTER CENTRAL TOOLS FOR SITE OWNERS

In the "Diagnostic" tab, there is a tool that will validate your robots.txt file, tells you which pages are restricted by that file and lists problem URL's and reasons for the problems. It also lets you make changes in a copy of your robots.txt file locally, which shows immediately how changes would affect the next crawl by all Google bots, including the Adsense and PPC landing page quality crawlers! They warn on that page that local changes don't affect your own robots.txt file and remind you to make the changes to the file on your server.

Another useful "Diagnostic" tool lets you set your preference for canonical URL's to include www or non-www versions of your site. (This last item shows how seriously the Google team takes this canonical issue.)

What other tools are provided in Webmaster Central?

Under the "Statistics" tab in Webmaster Central is are "Query stats, Crawl stats, Page analysis" links with more data on your pages. The Query statistics show your top 20 search queries that searchers have used to find your web site and your top 20 click through queries. Those data tables provide some interesting and sometimes unexpected detail about how visitors find your site and allow you to further optimize and funnel those visitors. The "Crawl Stats" promises to show PageRank and distribution of PageRank throughout your site and in comparison to other sites.

The "Sitemaps" tab simply lists your submitted sitemaps for all your sites and shows the dates "Submitted, Last Downloaded, and Sitemap Status." The status tells you if there are errors, and what they were (not allowed, external site links, 404 error page not found, etc.) I've just submitted a new sitemap on a just reserved, created and newly posted site this week and will report back on how long it took for index inclusion on that site to record the effect of early sitemap submissions.

LIFTING YOUR SKIRT FOR GOOGLE

Finally, there is a "Tools" link in the upper right corner of the "Sitemaps" page which allows you to "Download Data for all sites", "Report Spam in Our Index" and a "Reinclusion Request" link to use if you've been banned for questionable techniques. Clearly, since you are doing all of this from within a Google account, you are openly providing Google with your information and making all spam reporting and reinclusion requests under your name from within a Google account. This suggests that you trust Google with all information they hold on your sites and any complaint made about search engine spam.

Currently there are ratings tools from within the Webmaster Central site to let you tell Google if you like the tools with a smily face, a neutral face and a frowny face. This may not last as the program comes out of beta, but lets you tell them what is useful and what isn't.

Still need some help? Try joining, reading, searching and posting to Sitemaps and Webmaster Central Google Groups. Posts from webmasters get back responses from knowledgeable members. Watch for the little green "G" logo for Sitemaps team members for particularly definitive and useful recommendations.

http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help

http://groups.google.com/group/google-sitemaps

Want ongoing official Google blog posts about Webmaster Central?

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

If you've had trouble getting all your pages indexed and want to use those informative and useful webmaster tools and reports - give Webmaster Central a try.

Copyright © August 23, 2006 by Mike Banks Valentine

Mike Banks Valentine operates SEOptimism, Offering SEO training of in-house content managers
http://seoptimism.com/SEO_Staff_Training.htm as well as contract SEO for advertising agencies, web development companies and marketing firms. http://seoptimism.com/Ad_Agency_SEO_Contracting.htm

Content aggregation, article and press release optimization & distribution for linking campaigns.
http://seoptimism.com/Linking_SEO.htm

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Google Sitemaps: 7 Benefits You Can't Ignore

Google Sitemaps enables Webmasters to Directly Alert Google to Changes and Additions on a Website and that's just one of 7 Benefits.

Telling search engines about new pages or new websites use to be what the submission process was all about. But major search engines stopped using that process a long time ago.

Google has for a long time depended on external links from pages they already know about in order to find new websites.

For webmasters and website owners Google Sitemaps is the most important development since RSS or Blog and Ping, to hit the Internet.

Using RSS and Blog and Ping enabled webmasters to alert the search engines to new additions to their web pages even though that was not the primary purpose of these systems.

If you've ever waited weeks or months to get your web pages found and indexed you'll know how excited we webmasters get when someone discovers a new way to get your web pages found quicker.

Well that new way has just arrived in Google Sitemaps and it's a whole lot simpler than setting up an RSS feed or Blog and Ping. If you haven't heard of Blog and Ping it's a means by which it's possible to alert the search engines to crawl your new website content within a matter of hours.

If you're a webmaster or website owner Google Sitemaps is something you

Can't afford to ignore, even if you're also using RSS and/or Blog and Ping

The reason you should start using Google Sitemaps is that it's designed solely to alert and direct Google Search Engine crawlers to your web pages. RSS and Blog and Ping are indirect methods to alert search engines, but it's not there primary purpose.

It works now, but like most things it's becoming abused. Search Engines will find ways to combat the abuse as they've done with every other form of abuse that's gone before.

Abusing the search engines is a short term not a long term strategy and in some cases certain forms of abuse will get you banned from a search engines index.

You may also be thinking, don't we already have web page meta tags that tell a search engine when to revisit a page. That's true, but the search engine spider still has to find the new page first, before it can read the meta tag. Besides that meta tags are out of favour with many search engines especially Google, because of abuse.

If talk of search engine spiders leaves you confused, they're nothing more than software programs that electronically scour the Internet visiting web sites looking for changes and new pages.

How often the search engine spider alias robot, visits your website depends on how often your site content is updated, or you alert them to a change. Otherwise for a search engine like Google they may only visit a website once a month.

As the internet gets bigger every second of every day, the problem for search engines and webmasters is becoming evidently greater. For the search engines it's taking their search spiders longer to crawl the web for new sites or updates to existing ones.

For the webmaster it's taking longer and becoming more difficult to get web pages found and indexed by the search engines

If you can't get web pages found and indexed by search engines, your pages will never be found in a search and you'll get no visitors from search engines to those pages.

The answer to this problem at least for Google is Google Sitemaps

Whilst still only in a beta phase while Google refines the process, it's fully expected that this system, or one very similar, is here to stay.

Google Sitemaps is clearly a win-win situation

Google wins because it reduces the huge waste of their resources to crawl web sites that have not changed. Webmasters win because they alert Google through Google Sitemaps what changes or new content has been added to a website and direct Google's crawlers to the exact pages.

Google Sitemaps has the potential to speed up the process of discovery and addition of pages to Google's index for any webmaster that uses Google Sitemaps.

Conventional sitemaps have been used by webmasters for quite some time to allow the easier crawling of their websites by the search engine spiders. This type of sitemap is a directory of all pages on the website that the webmaster wants the search engines or visitors to find.

Without sitemaps a webmaster runs the risk of webpage's being difficult to find by the search engine crawlers, or never being found at all.

Do I need Google Sitemaps if I already have sitemaps on my websites?

Google Sitemaps are different to conventional sitemaps because they're only seen by the Search Engine Spiders and not human visitors. Google Sitemaps also contain information that's only of value to the search engine in a format they understand.

Creating Google Sitemaps in 5 steps

1. Create Google Sitemaps in a supported format ( see end of article )

2. Upload Google Sitemaps to your Web Hosting space

3. Register for a free Google Account if you don't already have one

4. Login to your Google Sitemaps Account and submit the location of your sitemaps

5. Update your Sitemaps when your site changes and Resubmit it to Google

From your Google Sitemaps account you can also see when your sitemap was last updated and when Google downloaded it for processing. It will also tell you if there were any problems found with your sitemaps.

Google Sitemaps can be used with commercial or non-commercial websites, those with a single webpage, through to sites with millions of constantly updated pages. However a single Google Sitemaps file is limited to 50,000 web pages. For websites with more pages, another Google Sitemaps file must be created for each block of 50,000 pages.

If you want Google to crawl more of your pages and alert them when content on your site changes, you should be using Google Sitemaps. The other added benefit is it's free.

If you're expecting this special alert process with Google Sitemaps to improve your Page Rank, change the way Google ranks your web pages, or in any way guarantee inclusion of your web pages, Google has made it clear it will make no difference.

Google Sitemaps web pages are still subject to the same rules as non Google Sitemaps pages.

If your site has dynamic content or pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, Google Sitemaps will allow spiders to know what URLs are available and how often page content changes.

Google has said that Google Sitemaps is not a replacement for the normal crawling of web pages and websites as that will continue in the conventional way. Google Sitemaps does however allow the search engine to do a better job of crawling your site.

The Google Sitemap Protocol is an XML file containing a list of the URLs on a site. It also tells the search engine when each page was last updated, how often each page changes and how important each page is in relation to other web pages in the site.

Google Sitemaps 7 Benefits You Can't Ignore

1. Alert Google to Changes and Additions to your Website Anytime You Want

2. Your Website is crawled more Efficiently and Effectively

3. Web Pages are Categorized and Prioritized exactly How You Want

4. Speed up the process of New Website and New Web Page Discovery

5. No Waiting and Guessing to see when Spiders crawl your web pages

6. Google Sitemaps is likely to set the standard for Webpage Submission and Update Notification which will extend the benefits to other Search Engines

7. The Google Sitemaps service is Free

Exactly how to create a Google Sitemaps file to upload to your website is in the continuing part of this article in Google Sitemaps.

Tony Simpson is a Web Designer and Search Engine Optimizer who brings a touch of reality to building a Web Business. It's a No-Hype, No B.S approach from his own 5 year experience. He provides advice, product reviews and products at Web Page Add Ons to Make Automation of Your Web Site Work for You.

The continuing part of this article about creating Google Sitemaps is at Google Sitemaps

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Google Sitemaps Explained - How To Use Google Sitemaps

Three Ways To Index Your Site With Google Sitemaps

[Difficult, Hard, And Easy]

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:

http://www.yoursite.com/

1.0

2005-07-03T16:18:09+00:00

daily

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 [https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html]

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:

[http://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

This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

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SEO - Google Sitemaps Explained

Once again I seem to be writing about Google. The reason Google keeps cropping up in these articles is that:

Google is a innovative company always coming up with new ideas to keep one step ahead of the competition.
Search Engines are the most important way that most webses generate new traffic.

Google is the most important of the Search Engines.

One of Googles latest implementations is a method of allowing web-designers and website owners to create specially formatted sitemap documents that inform and direct the Google robots. These sitemaps are a quick and easy way to keep your site constantly indexed and updated within the Google database and to ensure that all of your sites pages are crawled by the Google search engine robot. The program is called 'Google Sitemaps' and this is what Google themselves have to say about it:

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly. Google Sitemaps is intended for all web site owners, from those with a single web page to companies with millions of ever-changing pages. If any of the following are true, then you may be especially interested in Google Sitemaps:

o You want Google to crawl more of your web pages.

o You want to be able to tell Google when content on your site changes.

What is a Google Sitemap?

The Sitemap protocol requires the sitemap to be present on your web-server in the form of an XML document. XML is simple code like HTML and it is used to syndicate your content to all interested parties. You may have seen it in use for syndicating weblog entries via RSS to a news-reader. In the case of Google Sitemaps, the XML document is syndicated to Google and their software uses it to ensure that the pages of your website are crawled and indexed.

Before the introduction of Google Sitemaps, website-owners had to rely on the Google robot to find all of a websites links in order to make sure that all the pages were indexed. The introduction of Google Sitemaps now gives website owners some control over this process. In additoin, the XML format of the sitemap document also gives you control over several key variables.

If we examine a very simple chunk of code from a basic Google sitemap XML document we can see the variables we now have control over.

URL HERE1.02005-07-06T18:00:00+00:00weekly

This part of code describes one page of a website, so a typical Google Sitemap document would contain similar chunks of code for every page contained within the website. As you can see each web page has 4 variables:

LOCATION - Simply the URL of the web page.

PRIORITY - A number from 0.0 to 1.0 allowing you to set the priority of a particular page within your website. This number is a relative setting and relates only to those pages within your site. It allows you to instruct Google to pay more attention to particular key pages within your website.

LAST MODIFIED - This tells Google when your web pages were last modified so preventing the robot from having to index pages that haven't changed since its last visit.

CHANGE FREQUENCY - This allows you to tell Google how often the content of a page is likely to change. You can set it to never, yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly and always.

How do I create a Google Sitemap?

There are a number of ways to create a Google Sitemap document for your website.

The simplest but least controllable way is to use an online XML generator that will spider the pages in your website, and automatically create the XML file for you. With most you then have to upload the file to your web-server and inform Google of its presence. There are plenty of these scripts popping up and many of them are completely free. Select this link for a

The main disadvantage to using these online generators is that they need to be recreated each time you add new pages to your website. This won't be a problem for many website owners who rarely add new pages, but for those who are constantly adding new pages another approach may be better.

If you would like a little more control over the various parameters stored within your Google Sitemap XML document then a script that you configure and then upload to your web-server may be the answer for you. These are written in various scripting languages such as PHP or Perl and give you more control over your Google Sitemap. They do require some knowledge of scripting and installation to get them working which is beyond the scope of this article. Many however can be set up to run at regular intervals and not only spider your complete site and automatically generate your XML Google Sitemaps document but also upload it to the relevant place on your web-server and ping Google to tell them that the sitemap exists.

Finally you could use Googles own Sitemap generator which is a Python script and takes a little more knowledge to install and configure on your web-server. It also requires that Python 2.2 is installed on the server.

Note: These automatic Sitemap generators work by following the internal links within your website, any orphaned pages that are not linked to will not be included in your sitemap.

How do I submit my Sitemap to Google?

Whichever method you use to generate your Google Sitemaps document, you then need to submit it to Google. Most of the online generators and scripts will either do this for you or give you an option to do it once your XML document has been uploaded.

First, you should create a Google Sitemaps Account (which requires you to have a Google Account). This account enables Google to provide you with useful status and statistical information. The My Sitemaps page lets you know if there are problems with your Sitemap or with any of the URLs listed in it. Your Google Sitemaps account will also allow you to re-submit your Sitemaps document when you make changes to it.

Once your Sitemaps account is set up simply use the online forms to inform Google of the location of your new Sitemaps document and your site will soon be indexed.

Summary

Google Sitemaps give website owners the opportunity to inform Google about all the pages of their website. It should ensure that no pages are missed and also allows a certain degree of control over the relative importance of individual pages. Simply generating a Google Sitemaps document won't necessarily give you higher rankings within the search engines as you will still be competing with other websites for those top spots. Both on page Search Engine Optimisation and off-page promotion will still be essential. However, sitemaps make sure all your pages are crawled and indexed quickly by Google, and may therefore give you a competitive advantage over those websites that don't have a Google Sitemap.

Alan Cole runs http://www.pixelwave.co.uk, a one-person web design studio. His aim is to provide cost effective website design production and maintenance by offering professional web solutions that stand out from the crowd. Increasingly his work involves website promotion and Search Engine Optimisation as well as training courses on all aspects of web design and promotion.

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