Sitemap What Is It For And How Do You Make One

There are two type of sitemaps. One is sitemap for your visitor’s navigation and that usually has html, asp or php etc extension like the rest of your page The other type is Sitemap.xml which is made specifically for Google crawler and usually start with capital letter S.

A lot of webmasters feels that getting indexed by Google is really out of their hands. This is not the case, they can help to some degree. Though the indexing of a site is done by bots or crawlers, site will be indexed just fine without any help from the webmasters. So why bother with Sitemap?.

Bots or crawlers discover a website by following a link from other websites. The problem is sometimes those other websites only link one page of your website, at best maybe two or three. What if your website is new and no one is linking to it yet. With sitemap you can tell Google about your site as well as all pages in your website more accurately. You can tell the crawler about all of the pages in your websites including additional data such as when it was last updated, how often are the changes and how important is a particular page in relation to other pages. The crawler will have an easier job collecting information about your site therefore giving your pages a better chance to get indexed.

How do you make a sitemap?

If you are using Wordpress then you are in luck. All you need is a plugin called Google XML Sitemap. Download it, put it in plugin directory, activate it and run it manually. Your sitemap is then good and ready. You need to run it every time you create new posts.

If you don’t feel like creating a sitemap for your site, there are free tools that will do sitemap for you. Online sitemap creation tools are Dtools.net and XML-Sitemaps.com. While Gsitemap and Gsitecawler allow you to download their tools.

If you want to get dirty and do it your self or if you want to understand sitemap better, you can follow the direction below. The sitemap must begin with

• an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag.
• Specify the protocol standard within the <urlset> tag. Google adhere to Sitemap Protocol 0.9.
• Include a <url> entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
• Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

All other tags are optional such as

• <lastmod> The date of last modification.
• <changefreq> How frequent the pages are likely to chage with valid argumants are Always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and never.
• <priority> Is how important a particular page in relation to other pages on your site. Value range from 0.0 (not important) to 1.0 (very important). By default every page except your index page is assigned value of 0.5.

Sample Sitemap.xml

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.adsensechamber.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-07-17T15:51:43+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>

Thats for your index page. Now, just add another url section for each and every page.

<url>
<loc>http://www.adsensechamber.com/2008/tips/there-is-no-such-thing-as-smart-pricing-for-adsense/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-07-17T15:51:43+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.2</priority>
</url>

When you finished adding all pages from your site, don’t forget to close it with </urlset>

</urlset>

After that save the file on your root directory with the name of Sitemap.xml. You can have a look at your sitemap by going to http://yourdomain.tld/sitemap.xml where yourdomain.tld is your domain name and its tld.

If you are happy with that you can submit your sitemap to Google through Google Webmaster Tools but in my experience it is not necessary to do so. If your content is original and not copied from other site or PLR articles, you can expect your site to be indexed in a few days

There are actually different type of sitemap for different type of site such as video sitemaps, mobile sitemaps, news sitemaps etc with different tag and option. However, for standard blog or static html the above should be sufficient.

You can also submit your website (not your sitemap) to Google add url just for added precaution if your site is new.

Some Pointers from Google about What can a Sitemap contain

• A Sitemap can contain a list of URLs or a list of Sitemaps.
• If your Sitemap contains a list of other Sitemaps, you should save it as a Sitemap index file and use the XML format provided for that file type. A Sitemap index file cannot list more than 1,000 Sitemaps.
• A Sitemap file can contain no more than 50,000 URLs and be no larger than 10MB when uncompressed. If your Sitemap is larger than this, break it into several smaller Sitemaps. These limits help ensure that your web server is not overloaded by serving large files to Google.
• Specify all URLs using the same syntax. For instance, if you specify your site location as http://www.example.com/, your URL list should not contain URLs that begin with http://example.com/. And if you specify your site location as http://example.com/, your URL list should not contain URLs that begin with http://www.example.com/.
• Do not include session IDs in URLs.
• Do not include direct image URLs in Sitemaps. Google does not index the image directly; instead, we index the page on which the image appears. Direct image URLs included in Sitemaps won’t be indexed.
• The Sitemap URL must be encoded for readability by the webserver on which it is located. In addition, it can contain only ASCII characters. It can’t contain upper ASCII characters or certain control codes or special characters such as * and {}. If your Sitemap URL contains these characters, you’ll receive an error when you try to add it.

Give it a try but keep in mind that millions of new pages are added everyday and Google Crawler does need time before it gets to your site, but at least by doing this you will have done your part of the indexing.