Search Engine Optimization Articles.

GOOGLE SITEMAP EXPLANATION

Once again Google is taking the lead at making their search engine results the most relevant in the industry. With Google sitemaps webmasters don't have to wait for spiders to index their sites. Google sitemap empowers the Webmaster to submit page links pertaining to sites through one sitemap page. And what's great about this process is that when you add other pages to your site, all you need to do is add those pages to the sitemap file produced by Google. Google. Will even help you debug problems with your pages.

Will this process increase time to index? Google has also stated that since sitemaps is a Beta program they cannot guarantee when or if URLs will be crawled or added to their index.

So how would I participate in this program? I am glad you asked this question. First, access is free, yes free. Any site owner can participate in the Google sitemaps program. Site owners with single page sites to owners with millions of ever changing pages. Now lets get into the fun part, creating a sitemap. There are a number of ways to create sitemaps using the sitemap protocol.

1. If the majority of your site is a HTML static file or your URLs can be found in your access Logs or if you have a text file that contains a list of URLs in your site, you can use the Google sitemap generator.

2. If the majority of your site is dynamic URLs and may not show up in your access logs, you can generate a list of URLs as a text file and then use the Google sitemap generator.

3. You may not be able to use the Google sitemap generator. In this case you may be able to use a third party tool to create a sitemap.

4. Create the file manually or use a script based on the sitemap protocol that extracts dynamic content as URLs and includes information such as last modified date for those URLs. Once you sitemap is complete its time to place the file on your site. You must place the completed sitemap in the highest directory that you would like Google to crawl. Why is this so? Because Google can only accept URLs contained in your sitemap that are the same directory level or lower. If you only have access to sub directories place the sitemap at the tip most directory you have access and ensure the URLs listed in the sitemap are at that level or lower.

Now add the sitemap to your sitemap account and your all done. Its as easy as that. Things to keep in mind

1. A sitemap can contain a list of URLs or a list of sitemaps.

2. If your sitemap file contains a list of other sitemaps then you should save the sitemap file as a sitemap index file and use XML format provided for that file type.

3. A sitemap file can only contain no more than 50,000 URLs. If your site ahs more than 50,000 URLs then split up the URLs into smaller sitemap files and link them together.

4. Completely specify each URL .