Google Sitemaps Explained - How to Get Your Site Indexed With Google Sitemaps

Written by Titus Hoskins


Three Ways To Index Your Site With Google Sitemaps [Difficult, Hard, And Easy]

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 seenrepparttar orange XML icon 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.

Andrepparttar 147006 interested party in this case is Google. By creating Sitemaps Google is really asking webmasters to take charge of repparttar 147007 indexing and updating of their sites. Basically, doing repparttar 147008 Googlebot's job!

This is a 'Good' thing! Withrepparttar 147009 steady influx of new web sites growing rapidly, indexing all this material will become a challenge, even withrepparttar 147010 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 withrepparttar 147011 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:

< url> < loc>http://www.yoursite.com/< / loc> < priority>1.0< /priority> < lastmod>2005-07-03T16:18:09+00:00< /lastmod> < changefreq>daily< /changefreq> < /url>

Along with 'urlset' tags atrepparttar 147012 beginning and end of your code, and an XML version indication - that's basically your XML file! File size will depend onrepparttar 147013 number of webpages you have.

Taking a closer look at this XML file:

location - http://www.yoursite.com - name of your webpage

priority - you setrepparttar 147014 priority you want Google to place on that page in your site. You can prioritize your pages: 0.0 beingrepparttar 147015 least, 1.0 beingrepparttar 147016 highest, 0.5 is inrepparttar 147017 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 allrepparttar 147018 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 yourepparttar 147019 option of submitting a simple text file with all your URLs.

A Simple White Hat Technique To Get Indexed By Google

Written by Satyajeet Hattangadi


Everybody knows that getting indexed in Google is getting more and more difficult each day and every body is looking for that edge overrepparttar competition.

Most "white hat" SEO's frown upon methods like cloaking, blog and ping and other such "black hat" techniques and never had any special technique that they could use to help get their pages indexed better.

Well, presenting Google Sitemaps, Googles latest offering which is still inrepparttar 146727 beta stage, and which won't makerepparttar 146728 purists frown.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/stats

Google sitemaps is a service that allows webmasters to define how often their sites' content is going to change, which is supposed to give Google a better idea of what pages to index.

By placing a specially formatted XML file on your web server, you inform Google of whenever your pages change, and thenrepparttar 146729 googlebot crawlsrepparttar 146730 updated pages makingrepparttar 146731 necessary updates to its database.

Google has providedrepparttar 146732 format your xml file has to be in at https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html

An interesting point is thatrepparttar 146733 xml file has 2 tags, changefreq and priority with which you can also indicate how important each page is, and how frequentlyrepparttar 146734 page changes.

The valid values for changefreq are "always", "hourly", "daily", "weekly", "monthly", "yearly" and "never" and similarlyrepparttar 146735 priority can vary from 0.0 to 1.0, where 0.0 identifiesrepparttar 146736 lowest priority page(s) on your site and 1.0 identifiesrepparttar 146737 highest priority page(s) on your site.

Once you haverepparttar 146738 xml file in place on your server, you need to inform Google about it by opening this URL in your browser

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=URL

whererepparttar 146739 URL part inrepparttar 146740 above URL should berepparttar 146741 URL-encoded location of your Sitemaps xml file.

Now Google has provided an open source script that will automatically generaterepparttar 146742 xml file for you. The only drawback being its in a scripting language called Python.

Cont'd on page 2 ==>
 
ImproveHomeLife.com © 2005
Terms of Use