Create a Google Sitemap for Your Web Site

Google Sitemaps is a simple and fast way for your site tobe constantly indexed and updated by Google.

This article will discuss the benefits of implementing thisnew technology, who should use it, how it works and how tocreate a Google Sitemap for your web site.

Benefits of having a Google Site Map

1. Speeds up the discovery and addition of your web pagesin the Google index.

2. Enables Google to quickly find web pages that have beenrecently changed.

3. A method for your site to be listed and appear quicklyin Google.

4. Helps Google to keep search content fresh, so peoplehave the most up to date information available.

Who should use Google Sitemaps?

All site owners can use Google sitemaps whether you haveone page or millions of pages, however it's mostly gearedtowards people that make frequent changes to their webpages.

Normally web pages on a large site will not all get indexedbecause the links are too deep within the site. Byincluding all your pages in the Google Sitemap you have abetter chance of them all being indexed as Google thriveson fresh content. According to Google, it won't increaseyour site's rankings.

How does it work?

Google sitemaps are created using XML (Extensible MarkupLanguage). This is a coding language similar to HTML(thougha little more complex). It is often used these days insyndicated feeds or blogs.

Here is the sample XML code you would include for each pageof your site:

http://www.yoursite.com/
2005-07-15
monthly
0.5

(remove periods for code to work)

Here is a breakdown of what each line represents:

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

last modified - when you last modified the page.

change frequency - tells Google how often you modify thatparticular page, whether it's never, weekly, daily, hourly,monthly or yearly.

priority - sets the priority you want Google to place forthat page on your site. You can prioritize your pages: 0.0being the least, 1.0 being the highest, 0.5 is in themiddle.

This is only relative to your site. It will not affect yourrankings. Certain pages on your site may have moresignificance than others because they are updated moreoften ie home page, articles page.

How to Create a Dynamic Google SiteMap XML File

It would take a long time to create your Google Sitemap byhand especially if you have a site that contains 1000s ofpages.

Fortunately Google provides the Sitemap Generator thatallows you to generate a sitemap very quickly. It's aPython script that creates a Sitemap for your site usingthe Sitemap Protocol. This script can create Sitemaps from URL lists, web server directories, or from access logs.

You can read more about it here:

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

Other Sitemap Generators.

Google has also compiled a list of third party generators.

Personally I use the free sitemap generator It's simple to use and quickly produces the necessary XML code for your site.

Here are the steps on how to create your Sitemap using thisfree Sitemap Generator:

1. Go to http://www.sitemapspal.com and enter your site'saddress.
2. Copy the code that it generates for your site and pasteit into notepad.
3. Save the text file as sitemap.xml
4. Upload this file to the root directory (same place asyour home page) of your web server.
5. Open up a Google Site Map account and submityour site's address.
6. Every time you modify a page or pages, login to yourGoogle account and click on the resubmit button.
7. Repeat this procedure for all of your web sites.

Conclusion

Google is still the largest and most accessed search engineon Net. Each year millions of web sites get added to Googlemaking your site harder to find. Creating a Google Sitemapwill help your web pages stay fresh in Google's index.

Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW)owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com. Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hosting. You can read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/articles