How to Optimise Your Website for Google Sitemap, using Sitebuilder and XML.
Google sitemaps
A new indexing initiative which allows web administrators and SEO agents to submit their sitemaps to Google for a faster and more accurate search and index.
From Google.com “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 speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your web server, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.” So how do we go about setting this up?
You will need to create an XML page in Google’s Sitemap protocol format – each page on your site which you want to be indexed must be listed in the sitemap.xml file. The general format of each page can be seen as
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!--Google Site Map File Generated by http://www.sitemapbuilder.net Tue, 28 Feb 2006 12:25:52 GMT--> <urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"> <url> <loc>http://www.ishoppe.com.au/</loc> <lastmod>2006-02-28</lastmod> <changefreq>daily</changefreq> <priority>1</priority> </url>
Using Google sitemaps will enables webmasters to include additional information about each URL. when it was last updated; how often it changes; how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site etc.
The problem with this system
If you have a large site containing a few hundred independent pages, it will be a pain staking procedure to code each page in the Google sitemap protocol. Fortunately help is on the way.
The Solution
Using free GNU programs available on the net, web administrators can now automatically generate a sitemap.xml file painlessly. One such program is Sitemap Builder by SiteMapBuilder.NET. This is a free tool to automatically extract links from your entire site and generate a Google sitemap compatible XML file.
Where to find help?
There are many resources available on the web which will tell you about Google Sitemap, but if you are unfamiliar with XML and Coding, it will often to hard to comprehend..
I have created an easy to follow step by step guide with screenshots, which will step you through the process of generating a Google sitemap.xml and submit the sitemap to Google.
You may find the guide here http://www.ishoppe.com.au/Sitemap-Guide/sitemap.php
About the Author
John Chen
Vice President of Marketing http://www.ishoppe.com.au - Electronics Super Store (MP3 Players, Digital Cameras and Consumer Electronics Australia) Copyright Information - You may freely distribute this article and my guides; however you may not make any alterations to the code and content.
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