Google Sitemaps (291 views)

by BC Design

Google Sitemaps is a service offered by Google to help website owners with indexing and ranking on Google search. Graphs and diagnostics are also given to let the user analyse Google traffic. "The 5 Steps to Successful SEO" goes into detail on how to set up an account with Google to access the Google Webmaster Tools.

If you have made it to the screen asking for the link to your sitemap, you need to create one. A sitemap is an XML file that lists all the URL's for a website. It enables webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. - By submitting a sitemap to a search engine a webmaster is only helping that engine's crawlers to do a better job of crawling their site.

Below is a sample sitemap that contains just two URL's and uses all optional tags.

xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">


http://www.seomarketingsteps.com
2007-04-18
daily
0.8



http://www.seomarketingsteps.com/contact.html
2006-12-19
monthly
0.5





The information contained in the and is that which the search engine reads. Here is a break down of what each tag represents:

- Begins the XML code. This is found at the very beginning and very end.

xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd"
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> - This information is related to compatibility issues. Google Sitemaps can now be read by Yahoo! and Microsoft.

- Information contained in this tag tell the specifics of a page.

- Stands for location. This tag contains the Absolute link for the page. (i.e. http://www.seomarketingsteps.com)

- Stand for Last Date Modified. Enter the date the page was last modified in yyyy-mm-dd format.

- Stands for the Frequency the page Changes. You may enter daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

- Information within this tag tells importance level of the page. Index pages are most likely to have a high priority.

Feel free to copy and paste the above example code into a blank FrontPage document to begin creating your own sitemap. For every page on your website, you will add another ... . Google allows for up to 50,000 URL's, so don't worry about adding to many pages to your sitemap. Upon completion, save your FrontPage file as sitemap.xml and upload it/save it to your server.

About Author:

The author, Brad Brooks, is co-founder of The BC Design Team, a web design company featuring Internet Marketing services.

He is also author of "The 5 Steps to Successful Search Engine Optimization" and co-owner and chief SEO Analyst of SEOMarketingSteps.com, which provides free SEO tips and tutorials for Small Business owners.

This article is free to republish if author link to SEOMarketingSteps.com remains intact.

Added: 27 Apr 2007, 14:39

Article source: ArticleTrader.com