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

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

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Titus_Hoskins

* 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:

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

• 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> <loc>URL HERE</loc> <priority>1.0</priority> <lastmod>2005-07-06T18:00:00+00:00</lastmod> <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> </url>

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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