A sitemap for Google file tells Google about all the pages on your site and can contain relevant information about those pages, such as which are the most important and how often they change. When you submit a site map to Google, you are taking an important first step in getting your pages indexed by telling Google exactly what is on your site. As Google is arguably the most important search engine, this is a crucial step to take. The site-map for Google may be particularly helpful if your site is new and has few links to it. By helping to speed up the discovery of your pages, showing which of your website pages are most important and how often they change, you can help to influence what happens next. And every webmaster wants their site to be indexed as quickly as possible. As a sitemap for Google also provides another view into your site along with your index page, you need to know how you can get one easily. As the parameters for a successful sitemap for Google are very precise and you need to avoid the 'Errors' message being flagged up, here is one very easy way. This script from 'sitemapspal' is so simple that you need no knowledge other than the ability to copy and paste. All you do is type in your domain name or sub-directory name in the box provided above and press a button marked 'Make My Sitemaps XML'. The script will then scan that directory for internal links and display them in window on the page before you in the correct .xml format to meet Google's sitemap protocol. You should first copy this code by selecting it all, right clicking and choosing 'copy'. You then need to open a plain text file using notepad and paste the content into notepad.Save this file on your computer as 'mysitemap.xml' and upload it to your webserver using your FTP client. This file can then be submitted to Google Sitemaps and could help your website's inclusion in Google's natural results. I have done this with all eleven of my sites and the only error message I had was when I uploaded the wrong site-map to the wrong domain! |
