… and why I ‘m dying to get finally in the Google SERP

Have you also experienced that getting indexed on Google, despite the Google crawler visits each day your site, is getting tougher and tougher, not to say it’s apparently almost impossible in short term?! Between us, in the corridors of Google, they’re talking about the notorious ‘Google Sandbox’ theory. According this theory, a new website is first ’sandboxed’ and doesn’t get a ranking when the keywords of that website are not incredibly competitive. The Google Sandbox is in fact a filter placed in March of 2004 which new websites prevents from having immediately success in the Google search engine result pages. This filter "is only intended to reduce search engine spam". The sandbox filter is not a permanent filter for your website, what means you can only wait, wait and wait until Google liberates you from this filter. In mean time, don’t recline, but write original and well optimized content; write, publish and share articles, place a link on other websites etc.

An example:

I started with wallies.info this year on April 1st and submitted this URL on Google, Yahoo and MSN Search on the same day. Two months later, when I’m searching for ‘http://www.wallies.info’ and ‘wallies.info’, Google has twice 1 search result, Yahoo! twice 65 results and MSN Search 313 and 266 results. A remarkable difference, isn’t it?! Anyway, Google has a huge problem and backlog to index (new) pages. But two or three times a week, I receive a Google Alert for these two searches, but they aren’t encountered again in the Google search engine results pages (SERP) at all.

With the introduction of Google Sitemaps (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/), a beta website update reporting service, on Friday 3rd of June 2, I hope this will restrict the Sandbox waiting room. With a Sitemap, crawlers are better enabled to find out recently changed pages and get immediately a list of present pages. As Google Sitemaps is released under a Creative Commons license, all search engines can make use of it. Important to know is that Google Sitemaps will not influence the calculation of your PageRank.

Sitemaps has its own variant of the XML protocol and is called the ‘Sitemap Protocol’. For each URL some additional information such as the last modified date can be included.

There are several methods to create your XML Sitemap:

1. The Sitemap Generator (https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html) is a simple script that can be configured to automatically create Sitemaps and submit them to Google.

2. Make your own Sitemap script

3. With the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) protocol for metadata harvesting (http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html)

4. With RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 syndication feeds

5. A simple list of URLs with one per line

In the current RSS era, it’s obvious that the fourth method is the most logical and easiest. Roughly said, you need only to make a new XML template. For a working Sitemap example of the wallies.info blog, got to http://www.wallies.info/blog/gsm.php.

This XML Sitemap has to be submitted on the Google Sitemaps page ( https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ ). When you’ve updated your listed pages or your Sitemap has changed, you have to resubmit your Sitemap link for re-crawling. After I’ve submitted the wallies.info Sitemap, it took approximately between 3 and 4 hours before Google has downloaded the file.

Please note that Sitemaps doesn’t influence in no way the calculation of your PageRank, Google doesn’t add every submitted Sitemap URL to the Google Index and Google doesn’t guarantee anything about when or if your Sitemap pages will appear in the Google SERP.

Off course, it’s easier for you to set up an automated job to submit this XML-file.

You can do this with an automated HTTP request, like this example (your sitemap has to be URL encoded, this is everything behind /ping?sitemap=):

www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=
http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yoursite.com%2Fsitemap.xml

What is the Sitemap Protocol?

The Sitemap Protocol informs the Google search engine which pages in your website are available for crawling. A Sitemap consists of a list of URLs and may also contain additional information about those URLs, such as when they were last modified, how frequently they change, etc.

An example of the XML Sitemap format:

-

xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">

-

http://www.wallies.info/blog/

2005-06-07T05:34:36+02:00

daily

1.0

-

http://www.wallies.info/blog/item/130/index.html

2005-06-05T10:59:22+02:00

1.0

-

…

The XML Sitemap Format uses the following XML tags:

- urlset : this tag encapsulates all other tags of this list;

- url : this tag encapsulates the changefreq, lastmod, loc and priority tags of this list;

- changefreq (optional) is how frequently the content at the URL is likely to change. Valid values are ‘always’, ‘hourly’, ‘daily’, ‘weekly’, ‘monthly’, ‘yearly’ and ‘never’;

- lastmod (optional) is the time the content at the URL was last modified. The timestamp has to be in a ISO 8601 format;

- loc (required) : the URL location / a URL for a page on your site (< 2.048 characters).

- priority (optional) : the priority of the page relative to other pages on the same site and is a number between 0.0 and 1.0 (default 0.5). This priority is only used to select between URLs on your site. The priority of your pages will not be compared to the priority of pages on other sites.

An urlset may contain up to 50.000 URL’s and the file must not be larger than 10MB when uncompressed. Multiple Sitemaps are gathered in a Sitemap index file with a maximum of 1,000 sitemaps of the same site.

The Google Sitemaps URL: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

For feedback of this Sitemaps article, please feel free to visit http://www.wallies.info/blog/item/132/index.html

Walter V. is a self-employed internet entrepreneur and founder-webmaster of several websites, including wallies.info: A snappy blog about snappy blue things: blog | wiki | forum | links - http://wallies.info

mblo.gs: a snappy moblog community - http://mblo.gs

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

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

Benefits of having a Google Site Map

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

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

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

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

Who should use Google Sitemaps?

All site owners can use Google sitemaps whether you have one page or millions of pages, however it’s mostly geared towards people that make frequent changes to their web pages.

Normally web pages on a large site will not all get indexed because the links are too deep within the site. By including all your pages in the Google Sitemap you have a better chance of them all being indexed as Google thrives on fresh content. According to Google, it won’t increase your site’s rankings.

How does it work?

Google sitemaps are created using XML (Extensible Markup Language). This is a coding language similar to HTML(though a little more complex). It is often used these days in syndicated feeds or blogs.

Here is the sample XML code you would include for each page of 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 that particular page, whether it’s never, weekly, daily, hourly, monthly or yearly.

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

This is only relative to your site. It will not affect your rankings. Certain pages on your site may have more significance than others because they are updated more often 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 by hand especially if you have a site that contains 1000s of pages.

Fortunately Google provides the Sitemap Generator that allows you to generate a sitemap very quickly. It’s a Python script that creates a Sitemap for your site using the 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 this free Sitemap Generator:

1. Go to http://www.sitemapspal.com and enter your site’s address.
2. Copy the code that it generates for your site and paste it into notepad.
3. Save the text file as sitemap.xml
4. Upload this file to the root directory (same place as your home page) of your web server.
5. Open up a Google Site Map account and submit your site’s address.
6. Every time you modify a page or pages, login to your Google 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 engine on Net. Each year millions of web sites get added to Google making your site harder to find. Creating a Google Sitemap will 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

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 seen the orange XML logo 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.

And the interested party in this case is Google. By creating Sitemaps Google is really asking webmasters to take charge of the indexing and updating of their sites. Basically, doing the Googlebot’s job!

This is a ‘Good’ thing! With the steady influx of new web sites growing rapidly, indexing all this material will become a challenge, even with the 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 with the 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 at the beginning and end of your code, and an XML version indication - that’s basically your XML file! File size will depend on the number of webpages you have.

Taking a closer look at this XML file:

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

priority you set the priority you want Google to place on that page in your site. You can prioritize your pages: 0.0 being the least, 1.0 being the highest, 0.5 is in the 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 all the 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 you the option of submitting a simple text file with all your URLs.

Now there is already a flood of these generators popping up! Different ways of generating your XML powered sitemap file. More are probably appearing as you read this. But lets look at Three ways to generate your XML file.

Difficult Google’s Python Generator

That’s a relative term, if you know your server like the back of your hand and installing scripts doesn’t scare the bejesus out of you, you’re probably smiling at the word difficult. Google supplies a link to a generator which you can download and set up on your server. It will cough up your sitemap XML file and automatically feed it to Google. Google XML Generator

In order for this Generator to work, Python version 2.2 must be installed on your web server, many servers don’t have this. If you know what you’re doing, this will probably be a good choice.

You don’t need a Google Account to use Sitemaps but it’s encouraged because you can track your sitemap’s progress and view diagnostic information. If you already have another Google Account gmail, Google Alerts, etc. just use that one to sign in and follow directions from there.

To submit your Sitemap using an HTTP request, issue your request to the following URL:

www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

Hard A PHP Code Generator

This is a php generator that you can place on your server. This generator will spider your site, and produce your XML sitemap file. Download the phpSitemapNG and upload it your server. Run the generator to get your XML sitemap file and send it to Google. PHP Generator

Again, this is only hard to do if you don’t know your way around PHP files or scripts.

Easy Free Online Generator

These Generators are popping up everywhere, and Google now keeps a list of these ‘third party suppliers’ of generators on their site. Find them here: Google’s List of Third Party Generators

One of the easiest to use is www.xml-sitemaps.com, and you can index up to 500 pages with this online Generator very quickly and it will give you the sitemap XML file Google needs to index your site.

It will go into your site, spider it and index all your pages into an XML sitemap of your site. You can download this file, Compressed or Non- compressed and make minor changes such as setting the priority, changing frequency, etc.

Then upload this file to your site as sitemap.xml to the root directory of your server i.e. where you have your homepage. Then notify Google Sitemaps of your XML file and you’re in business.

Of course, the only drawback, if you constantly add pages to your site you will need to also add these pages to your XML sitemap file. This won’t be much of a problem unless you’re daily adding pages to your site — then you will need something like the PHP or Python generator to do all this for you automatically.

Google is still the major search engine on the web so getting your pages indexed and updated quickly is the major reason to use Google Sitemaps. If you want your site to remain competitive it’s probably the wisest route to take.

To learn more about the different Services and Programs offered
by Google click here: Google Adsense & Google Adwords

Copyright © 2005 Titus Hoskins of http://www.bizwaremagic.com

This article may be freely distributed if this resource box stays attached.

Once again I seem to be writing about Google. The reason Google keeps cropping up in these articles is that:

• Google is a innovative company always coming up with new ideas to keep one step ahead of the competition.

One of Googles latest implementations is a method of allowing web-designers and website owners to create specially formatted sitemap documents that inform and direct the Google robots. These sitemaps are a quick and easy way to keep your site constantly indexed and updated within the Google database and to ensure that all of your sites pages are crawled by the Google search engine robot. The program is called ‘Google Sitemaps’ and this is what Google themselves have to say about it:

Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index. By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly. Google Sitemaps is intended for all web site owners, from those with a single web page to companies with millions of ever-changing pages. If any of the following are true, then you may be especially interested in Google Sitemaps:

• You want Google to crawl more of your web pages.

• You want to be able to tell Google when content on your site changes.

What is a Google Sitemap?

The Sitemap protocol requires the sitemap to be present on your web-server in the form of an XML document. XML is simple code like HTML and it is used to syndicate your content to all interested parties. You may have seen it in use for syndicating weblog entries via RSS to a news-reader. In the case of Google Sitemaps, the XML document is syndicated to Google and their software uses it to ensure that the pages of your website are crawled and indexed.

Before the introduction of Google Sitemaps, website-owners had to rely on the Google robot to find all of a websites links in order to make sure that all the pages were indexed. The introduction of Google Sitemaps now gives website owners some control over this process. In additon, the XML format of the sitemap document also gives you control over several key variables.

If we examine a very simple chunk of code from a basic Google sitemap XML document we can see the variables we now have control over.

This part of code describes one page of a website, so a typical Google Sitemap document would contain similar chunks of code for every page contained within the website. As you can see each web page has 4 variables:

LOCATION - Simply the URL of the web page.

PRIORITY - A number from 0.0 to 1.0 allowing you to set the priority of a particular page within your website. This number is a relative setting and relates only to those pages within your site. It allows you to instruct Google to pay more attention to particular key pages within your website.

LAST MODIFIED - This tells Google when your web pages were last modified so preventing the robot from having to index pages that haven’t changed since its last visit.

CHANGE FREQUENCY - This allows you to tell Google how often the content of a page is likely to change. You can set it to never, yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly and always.

Click here for more information on the XML Protocol used by Google Sitemaps

How do I create a Google Sitemap?

There are a number of ways to create a Google Sitemap document for your website.

The simplest but least controllable way is to use an online XML generator that will spider the pages in your website, and automatically create the XML file for you. With most you then have to upload the file to your web-server and inform Google of its presence. There are plenty of these scripts popping up and many of them are completely free. Select this link for a

The main disadvantage to using these online generators is that they need to be recreated each time you add new pages to your website. This won’t be a problem for many website owners who rarely add new pages, but for those who are constantly adding new pages another approach may be better.

If you would like a little more control over the various parameters stored within your Google Sitemap XML document then a script that you configure and then upload to your web-server may be the answer for you. These are written in various scripting languages such as PHP or Perl and give you more control over your Google Sitemap. They do require some knowledge of scripting and installation to get them working which is beyond the scope of this article. Many however can be set up to run at regular intervals and not only spider your complete site and automatically generate your XML Google Sitemaps document but also upload it to the relevant place on your web-server and ping Google to tell them that the sitemap exists.

Finally you could use Googles own Sitemap generator which is a Python script and takes a little more knowledge to install and configure on your web-server. It also requires that Python 2.2 is installed on the server. Select this link for more information on Googles Sitemap Generator

Note: These automatic Sitemap generators work by following the internal links within your website, any orphaned pages that are not linked to will not be included in your sitemap.

How do I submit my Sitemap to Google?

Whichever method you use to generate your Google Sitemaps document, you then need to submit it to Google. Most of the online generators and scripts will either do this for you or give you an option to do it once your XML document has been uploaded.

First, you should create a Google Sitemaps Account (which requires you to have a Google Account). This account enables Google to provide you with useful status and statistical information. The My Sitemaps page lets you know if there are problems with your Sitemap or with any of the URLs listed in it. Your Google Sitemaps account will also allow you to re-submit your Sitemaps document when you make changes to it.

Once your Sitemaps account is set up simply use the online forms to inform Google of the location of your new Sitemaps document and your site will soon be indexed.

Summary

Google Sitemaps give website owners the opportunity to inform Google about all the pages of their website. It should ensure that no pages are missed and also allows a certain degree of control over the relative importance of individual pages. Simply generating a Google Sitemaps document won’t necessarily give you higher rankings within the search engines as you will still be competing with other websites for those top spots. Both on page Search Engine Optimisation and off-page promotion will still be essential. However, sitemaps make sure all your pages are crawled and indexed quickly by Google, and may therefore give you a competitive advantage over those websites that don’t have a Google Sitemap.

Alan Cole runs http://www.pixelwave.co.uk, a one-person web design studio. His aim is to provide cost effective website design production and maintenance by offering professional web solutions that stand out from the crowd. Increasingly his work involves website promotion and Search Engine Optimisation as well as training courses on all aspects of web design and promotion.

Yahoo! has copied Google Sitemaps by offering an easy way to submit all your Web pages. It’s a simplified version of Google Sitemaps, a text file that contains a list of your site’s URL’s.

Previously, you could only submit your home page to Yahoo!. Now, however, in theory, Yahoo! knows about all your pages.

Like Google Sitemaps and any submission process, it does NOT guarantee that Yahoo! will crawl or index your pages, nor will it influence rankings for your keywords. But it sure is a great way to put all your pages in front of Yahoo! in a single submission!

Aside from a simpler format and lack of reporting (for now), the concept is the same as Google. They know a human with root access to your site is telling them about all the URL’s. This saves a lot of submitting and spidering time. However, I still recommend that you submit your home page to Yahoo! in the normal way.

Creating and Submitting your Sitemaps File to Yahoo!

STEP 1: Create a text file (e.g. sitemap.txt) containing a list of your URL’s, with one URL per line. If you have a site with hundreds or even thousands of pages, Yahoo! also recognizes compressed versions of this file (e.g. sitemap.gz).

Once created, upload this file to your domain root (e.g. www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.txt). If you have more than one domain, simply create and upload a new Sitemap to each domain you want to submit.

STEP 2: Log into Yahoo!’s Free Submit page with your Yahoo! ID and Password at: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

If you don’t have a Yahoo! account, or don’t use Yahoo! Mail, you will need to create an account by clicking on the "Sign Up" link.

STEP 3: Submit your Yahoo! Sitemap URL by pasting the URL into the "Enter your URL" box. Repeat for each domain you have created a Sitemap for.

That’s it… Nothing more to do except for updating this file each time you add or remove pages from your site, so to keep Yahoo! informed of the changes.

Derek Jones is the owner of Mirage Home Business Systems, a service that’s geared to helping people start a profitable Home-Based Business online. For more details on starting a Work at Home Internet Business and to join our Free Home Business Tips Newsletter, visit: http://www.HomeBusinessCreation.com

I am a relative newbie to website creation. Many webmasters (from beginners to experienced ones) continually scratch their head wondering “how can I get Google to index my new content?” Google has a program where you can automatically create an xml sitemap for your website. The sitemap contains a list of all your urls with the modification time and the change frequency for each url. After you have created your sitemap, you need to submit the sitemap to Google (using your Google sitemap account). After this, your need to ping (resubmit) Google every time your website changes. The idea here is that you are helping Google by letting them know you have new content on your site. The url list in the sitemap ensures that Google will not miss any of your urls while crawling your site.

Well there is the theory, how about REALITY?

The reality is that CREATING A SITEMAP AND PINGING GOOGLE WILL NOT GET GOOGLE TO COME TO COME AND INDEX YOUR SITE. What will happen? Several hours after your submit your sitemap to Google, Google will download your sitemap. Good so far. Then days will go by and Google will never come and index any of the urls in your sitemap. Boy that really stinks especially when considering it took me some time to figure out actually how to create a sitemap. Google does not make it real easy for you to create a sitemap. Google has a free script that you install on your web server that will automatically create and update your sitemap for you. The problem is that the script requires Python 2.2 to be installed on your web server. This seemed stupid to me since Python is not standard on the majority of web hosts (why not have the script written in PHP or PERL)? Anyway I found a free third party PHP sitemap generator at http://enarion.net/google/phpsitemapng/ that worked great.

In conclusion, having a sitemap that tells Google you have new content will not get Google to come to index your site. I guess the only way to get Google to index your site is to have incoming link from popular sites that Google can crawl along. Incidentally lack of regular crawling also makes the Google Adsense Search not work properly for searching your own site. I put a Google Search box on my site. However, because Google has not indexed my site yet, user searches of my site generate no results! This appears to be a problem for anyone who generates new content faster than Google indexes it. The user experience suffers due to this as I can not think of any reason a user would not what to find the most recent information on your site. In all fairness I should say a sitemap and Google Adsense search may be valuable for popular, well established websites that get indexed frequently. However, if you are relatively new to the online game, spend your effort on other aspects of your site!

Rahul Patharkar is dedicated to helping computer users get the most out of their computer experience. Rahul runs http://computer-help-center.com, a site that provides many informative guides to helps its users run their computers securely and efficiently. Rahul specializes in computer backup options and strategies.

Google’s calling your name…

Hi, Google here. We want to index your website…

Is anyone there?

This article has a free corresponding online video tutorial that shows you how to summons the magic Googlebot to spider and index every page on your website, and it will only take about 10 minutes of your time.

Go here now to watch exactly what to do, step-by-easy-step…

http://www.gothrive.com/google-sitemap-video.htm

What you have access to with the new Google Sitemaps program is truly a gift from the Google gods. They’ve offering you a tool that you can use to keep your site constantly indexed and updated in the search engine database. With Google Sitemaps, webmasters can now take charge and make sure that their entire site is crawled and indexed.

One important note to make is that the Google Sitemaps program will not necessarily improve the ranking of your site’s pages. It only ensures that Google knows what you’ve got online for them to look at.

Before reading the following statement, promise yourself that you won’t stop reading if you see a term that seems a little scary. OK? Promise? Good. Go ahead and keep reading then.

The format specified by Google for "their" sitemap is XML (extensible markup language). Did I loose you yet? No? Good again.

You do not need to understand how to code XML to participate in the Google Sitemap program. There are plenty of free online tools that will create your XML sitemap for you with no XML knowledge required on your part. More on this in a second.

What information is including in this XML sitemap?

1) The URL for every file on your website.

2) A relative priority rank that you can assign telling Google which pages on your site are most important for them to look at.

3) The date last modified for each page.

4) Anticipated change frequency per URL. This again is a variable that you control.

According to Google, your XML sitemap can include up to 50,000 URL’s. If your site is a real monster and has in excess of 50,000 URL’s, then you’ll need to create a hierarchy of sitemaps with one leading to the next. This way you’ll be able to lead Google to all of your pages.

The options for generating and maintaining your Google Sitemap range from complex systems that are highly automated to very simple systems using online sitemap generators that require nothing more than clicking a few buttons.

Google now keeps a list of these ‘third party suppliers’ of generators on their site. Find them here: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

The program that’s demonstrated in our free video tutorial (http://www.gothrive.com/google-sitemap-video.htm) is found here: http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

In a nutshell, here are the steps involved with using online generators:

1) Start the program.

2) Enter your site’s URL

3) Click the "Start Crawling" button

4) Customize URL priorities and change frequencies

5) Save the site map to your local hard drive

6) Upload your new Google XML sitemap to your website in the root directory (where your home page resides)

7) Validate your new sitemap (can be done here: http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/internet/google/submit-validate-sitemap/)

8) Submit your XML sitemap to Google.

You can access the pages for the Google Sitemap program here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

8 steps in about 10 minutes. That’s all there is to it.

One question that you might ask is whether or not you still need an HTML sitemap, and the answer is "Yes, you still need your conventional sitemap". XML sitemaps are not intended for human visitors. To see what I mean, take a look at the two following sitemaps:

HTML sitemap: http://www.gothrive.com/sitemap.html

XML sitemap: http://www.gothrive.com/sitemap.xml

Which version do you prefer? Your visitors will like the HTML and Google prefers XML.

When you add pages or new content to your site and you want Google to go back to have a fresh look, just log in to your Google Sitemaps control panel, select the sitemap to revisit, and click "Resubmit". It’s never been easier to get Google to spider and index a website. Don’t miss your opportunity to use this tool to your advantage.

Copyright 2005 Ron Hutton

Ron Hutton is a 20 year sales and marketing veteran with a passion for coaching and training. Subscribe to "GoThrive Online", for big juicy marketing tips in small, easy-to-chew, bite size servings. Free Video Tutorial Archives Here: http://www.gothrive.com/free-video-library/video-directory.html

I don’t mind admitting that every time some new fangled idea or piece of technology arrives online, I have a small fit and wonder how long it’s going to take me to understand what it is, what it’s for and whether I need to use it to stay ‘up there’. It’s even more frightening when the experts start explaining it and really only serve to confuse the matter when they use their ‘techno-speak’.

Here I am still wrestling with RSS and along comes Google with their Sitemap program. I must admit, it sounds simple enough until you read a couple of articles about how to generate your sitemap or go to Google’s instructions and manage to get completely confused. I don’t know what it is, although I know it’s not just me. I know too many people who work online and have the same problem. Maybe we just went to school in the wrong decade (seventies or maybe earlier). But then, we can spell and write, can’t we…

For those who need to know what the Google Sitemap program is about, here it is in the nutshell and in MY language - English. At least, what I think it is, anyway:

Google, I imagine have become tired of crawling billions of websites, most of which are largely inactive or abandoned or both. So they are giving webmasters (website owners) the opportunity to play a part in the frequency and importance placed on the crawling of our websites. Even to the point of giving us the ability to prioritize these aspects of the individual pages. In doing so, they are also having us do some of their work for them, which is OK, seeing as they are our websites. I think it’s grand.

In their instructions, Google give a few different methods by which you can generate a suitable Sitemap and how to get it onto your server etc. To be honest, I found it totally confusing. They do suggest that we use their Sitemap generator, but it is only compatible if your server uses a thing called ‘Python 2.2’ and you need to know the command that launches it… WHAT??? There’s that ‘nerd stuff’ again. Every time I send a simple question to my webhost, like, “what’s your name”, I get three paragraphs of unintelligible ‘techno-speak’, so how do I find out if I have some ‘Snake-thingy’ on my server? So, Google’s instructions are no good to me, or anyone like me. Even their alternatives, although slightly simpler, don’t answer ALL the questions I need answered in order to get through it in one piece.

Fortunately, through trial and error (or maybe because I may actually be turning into a ‘nerd’), I can tell you how to generate a Sitemap, upload it to you server (and more importantly, WHERE to put it) and how to submit it to Google.

First, you go to this website - http://www.blocklayer.com/googlesitemap/ and you will find that all you need to do is put the URL of you website (the main domain name) into the appropriate field and click “Create map”. It will create a list of the pages in your website and will, helpfully, also list any broken or inactive links (which you can go about fixing). You can change the frequency with which each page is crawled and rate it’s importance. Obviously, pages which change often, need to be crawled more often etc. When you’re happy with your list of pages, you click on “XML Sitemap” and it creates a coded XML Sitemap. XML is the code that’s used in RSS, which looks much like HTML.

Now, and this is the magic bit, you need to do one more thing before you can upload to your server. You need to copy and paste the XML code to a ‘Notepad’ document. You call the file ‘sitemap.xml’. Now the WHOLE of that file name goes in the ‘Filename’ box,. The ‘.xml’ doesn’t go into the ‘file type’ box, like it would in a Word, Excel or any other program. Low and behold, the little ‘Notepad’ program magically recognizes the fact that it is XML format (I don’t know how, probably mirrors…) and the file you end up with has the ‘.xml’ file extension. That is what you upload to your server.

It’s very easy. You just place it under what they call the ‘Root Directory’. I’ve learned that this is the ‘Main Folder’ (I don’t know why they just don’t say ‘Main Folder’, but…). So, it goes into the very first folder of your website. If using cPanelX® it’s called ‘html public’. If using Frontpage®, it’s simply the folder with the main URL as it’s name.

My first question was, “What about Sub-Domains?” Do I have to submit separate Sitemaps or will they be included in the one I generate for the Main Domain? The answer is that Sub Domains won’t be included in the Main Sitemap, you need to generate a separate one by simply using the Sub-Domain URL in the generator. This is handy because each Sub-Domain will usually have unique needs and it would be more than awkward if they were all included in the main Sitemap.

Obviously, in the case of a Sub Domain, the ‘Root Directory’ or ‘Main Folder’ you put this Sitemap into is the Main Sub-Domain folder, that is, the first one under the Main Domain folder.

Submitting to Google is a really easy process. You just log into your Google account (you have to have one) and go to the ‘Add a Sitemap’ section and enter the COMPLETE filename of the sitemap, which will be: http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml and click on ‘Submit URL’.

Although I have had a little fun with the fact that I still, after several years earning a living online, don’t understand a lot of the ‘lingo’. To those of you who are in the same position or those who are new to this Internet business thing, I can honestly say, you will get a handle on it and find that all these things, which may seem completely overwhelming at first, will make sense and come more easily if you take the time to read a little and find out. I’ve obviously surrendered to this concept and it has made things much easier.

Oh God! I think I’m a Nerd!

Stephen Brennan is the author of the popular ebook title ‘The Affiliate Guide Book’ - The Definitive guide to Affiliate SUCCESS. He also runs The Home Based Business and Affiliate Center.

The Site Map is a too often overlooked piece of the Search engine Optimization Puzzle. Here is a Simple Step 7 step approach to create a Super Charged Site Digest on Steroids that will get your web pages indexed faster and more often.

Step 1 Use Pseudo Directory Naming Convention

A Recent Article (’See How Using a Pseudo Directory Can Increase your Page Ranking and Organize your Web Site’) discussed how you could increase your Page Rank scores by using a Pseudo Directory. (http://ewguru.com/pseudo-directory).

Briefly keep all your web pages in one Directory but append a Prefix to the name so you could organize your pages like a Directory structure and still get the Page Rank Boost for having all your pages nearer the root.

As an Example For a Web Site about Pillows may have

‘Buck’ as Prefix for Buckwheat Pillows

‘Fea’ as a Prefix for a Feather Pillow

‘Poly’ as a prefix for Polyester Pillows. Files would now be named:

Buck-QueenSize.html

Fea-QueenSize.html

Poly-Queensize.html

Step 2 Keep Your Pseudo-Directories Small and Manageable.

An Efficient way to use this method is to find and republish 10 to 20 articles at the same time with the same topic. All articles on the advantages of Buck Wheat Pillows would be named:

buck-article1.html

buck-article2.html

buck-article3.html

….

buck-article10.html

After 10 to 20 Articles are Published to the Web-Site a Table of contents is created as per step 3. A few days later more articles about Buck Wheat Pillows are added and are assigned a Prefix ‘buck2′. All these new pages are now named:

buck2-article1.html

buck2-article2.html

buck2-article3.html

….

buck2-article10.html A Table of Contents is Now Created for ‘Buck2′

Similarly next time Articles about Buckwheat Pillows are collected ‘Buck3′ would be used as a Prefix.

The Main advantages of this method are:

Google will easily find and index all your new pages

Lots of Small manageable Pseudo-Directories Each with their own Table of Contents.

Your Site-Digest in Step 4 is always Fresh and Changing changing.

Step 3 Create a Table of Contents for each Pseudo Directory

So Lets say under Buckwheat you have the Following Pages

Buck-QueenSize.html

Buck-TravelSize.html

Buck-NeckPillow.html

Buck-isBetter.html

Buck-releivespain.html Create a Table of contents for your Buckwheat Pillows Listing only your Buckwheat Files and Call it ‘Buck-Table-of-Contents.Html’. Similarly you would have a Table of contents for your Polyester and Feather Pillows.

Step 4 Create a Site-Digest with all your Products

Create a File and name it Site-Digest.html and list the Buck, Poly and Feather Table of Contents Files. Of course this Site-Digest File would also contain your Mattress Table of Contents and Towel Table of contents and anything else you may sell.

A Sample Site Digest may look like this

Buck Wheat Pillows Table of Contents

Feather Pillows Table of Contents

Polyester Pillows Table of Contents

Mattress Table of Contents

….

Bath Shop Table of Contents

Step 5 The Google Sitemap File

You would now create a Google Sitemap file. Be sure and tell google that your Site-Digest File Changes often. This way google will grab this page and Index your site (http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/googlesitemap.html)

Step 6 Step Keep Your Site-Digest Current

Every time you create a new pseudo-directory and Table of contents for that pseudo-directory simply add it to your Site-Digest. Now when Google grabs your Site-Digest it will Spider all your new Table of Contents and Magically Index your new pages.

Step 7 Super Charge your Site- Digest

If you would like to Super Charge your Site-Digest Name your Hyperlinks with descriptive Keywords. Add A Summary about each item in your Site-Digest

Buck Wheat Pillows Table of Contents - Description

Buck Wheat Pillows Table of Contents - Link

Feather Pillows Table of Contents - Description

Feather Pillows Table of Contents - Link

Polyester Pillows Table of Contents - Description

Polyester Pillows Table of Contents - Link

Mattress Table of Contents - Description

Mattress Table of Contents - Link

….

Bath Shop Table of Contents - Description

Bath Shop Table of Contents - Link

By Following the above simple steps and creating a Super Charged Site-Digest you will make it easier for Google to index your current and all of your new Web Pages.

Mike Makler has been Marketing Online Since 2001 and has built a Huge 100,000 Member Organization in a Popular online Program.

Subscribe to Mike’s Newsletter here http://www.ewguru.com/hbiz/list-sign-up.html

Get some useful Free Downloads Here: http://trafficninja.com,

Some more Articles from Mike: http://weeklytipsandtricks.blogspot.com/

Mailto:weeklytips@kioskcities.ws

Copyright © 2005-2006 Mike Makler: all rights reserved.

Back in September 2005, I published an article titled "Introducing Yahoo! Sitemaps" which explained how to submit a complete list of your URL’s to Yahoo! using a standard text file.

Recently however, I’ve received a couple of emails plus heard a few rumours stating that Yahoo! does not recognize a standard text file (e.g. sitemap.txt) containing a list of your site’s URL’s. These emails and rumours suggest that this file should be in HTML, XML or contain Tags.

Just to clarify…

Unlike Google Sitemaps which accepts Sitemaps in XML (Extensible Markup Language — a widely used standard for textual information exchange between applications on the Internet), Yahoo! uses a simplified version… a text file that contains a list of your site’s URL’s. Google also accepts this format in place of XML.

When creating this file, it should contain ONLY a list of your URL’s, with one URL per line… nothing more. If you have a site with hundreds or even thousands of pages, Yahoo! also recognizes compressed versions of this file (e.g. sitemap.gz).

So for example, the contents of your text file will look like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/
http://www.yoursite.com/page1.html
http://www.yoursite.com/page2.html
http://www.yoursite.com/page3.html
http://www.yoursite.com/dir/page1.html

Where I think the confusion stems, is that Yahoo! now allows you (via their submission page) to submit your feeds in a variety of formats (RSS 0.9, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3). The way this works is that their crawler will extract links and find pages not already discovered within your feeds.

These files will be in XML and if your feed contains a complete list of the URL’s you want indexed, then a text file is not required. However and if you want Yahoo! to know about all your pages, then a standard text file should be used, containing nothing more but a list of your URL’s, with one URL per line.

Hopefully and with Yahoo! now allowing the submission of feeds, it shouldn’t be long before you’re able to submit XML Sitemaps, just as you do with Google. In fact, submitting a XML Sitemap to Yahoo! may even work, although there is no proof to support this theory…

… In the meantime however (especially if your site is not feed enabled or if your feed does not contain all your site’s URL’s), it looks as though that you’ll have to continue to use a standard text file if you wish to submit a complete list of your site’s URL’s to Yahoo!

For more information plus to submit your site, sitemap or feeds to Yahoo!, log into the Free Submit page with your Yahoo! ID and Password at: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

To your marketing success.

Derek Jones is the owner of Mirage Home Business Systems, a service that’s geared to helping people start a profitable Home-Based Business online. For more details on starting a Work at Home Internet Business and to join our Free Home Business Tips Newsletter, visit: http://www.HomeBusinessCreation.com