By : Nidhi Gupta

Sitemaps are your Table of Contents to your website. They serve to save a users’ time allowing them to browse for specific information. Sitemaps are also used by search engines to find specific keywords or phrases.

Creating sitemaps has become much easier with the introduction of software technology. You will only need a notepad, program editor, and a little some ’stick-to-it-tiveness’.

Step 1
Using your notepad or any word processor, type all the parts of your website. Be sure to include all the pages and links. Format the document like a list of contents. This will serve as a draft.

Step 2
To insert the document on to the website, create a new page or use one of the existing pages. Now using your notepad add all of the necessary tags for a webpage or use your website creator program.

Step 3
You must not create a link to the sitemap. Create a link on the front page of your website and on each page thereafter.

Step 4
Now make sure the sitemap is working correctly. Make sure that each and every link for errors and then fix them accordingly.

Step 5
The sitemap is now ready to be loaded to your browser and double checked. Does it run smoothly?

If you don’t have what it takes to setup a sitemap manually then try searching for an online program that will do the work for you. This will provide a generic sitemap but it will function the same. Otherwise you can customize your own with some simple computer know-how.

Sitemaps are the lifeline of your website. People can find things more efficiently and the sitemap will let you know if they have found it. And during their browsing they may find something else of interest.

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By : Nidhi Gupta

The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap that uses the Sitemap Protocol is an XML file that lists URLs for a site. The protocol was written to be highly scalable so it can accommodate sites of any size. It also 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) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

Sitemaps are particularly beneficial when users can’t reach all areas of a website through a browseable interface. (Generally, this is when users are unable to reach certain pages or regions of a site by following links). For example, any site where certain pages are only accessible via a search form would benefit from creating a Sitemap and submitting it to search engines.

Please note that the Sitemap Protocol supplements, but does not replace, the crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. By submitting a Sitemap (or Sitemaps) to a search engine, you will help that engine’s crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Using this protocol does not guarantee that your webpages will be included in search indexes. (Note that using this protocol will not influence the way your pages are ranked by Google.) but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

Sitemap 0.90 is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

Google adheres to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as dictated by sitemaps.org. Sitemaps created for Google using Sitemap Protocol 0.9 are therefore compatible with other search engines that adopt the standards of sitemaps.org.

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By : Nidhi Gupta

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 spammers 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.

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. 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
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.

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