Tuesday, February 8, 2011

How to make a google sitemap in xml for your site easily

For your website to be updated in googles search engine you really need a sitemap.

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site that might not otherwise be discovered.

In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S— is a list of the pages on your website.

Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:
• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

This is the easiest and quickest way I know of doing it go to:

http://www.freesitemapgenerator.com/

Create an account: This will involve an email address that you can confirm.
Upload a small file to the root directory of your server.
Go to your free site map generator account and click “create site map”.
When the sitemap is complete you will be emailed with instructions on how to download your XML sitemap.
You can do this as many times as you like for as many sites as you like.
This FREE sitemap service is approved by Google and is very easy to use

It should be added that Google accept sitemaps in
RSS, mRSS, and Atom 1.0: Google accepts RSS (Real Simple Syndication) 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds. If you have a blog with an RSS or Atom feed, you submit the feed's URL as a Sitemap. Most blog software creates your feed for you

Google also accepts sitemaps in a text file.

Text file: You can provide Google with a simple text file that contains one URL per line. For example:

http://www.example.com/file1.txt
http://www.example.com/file2.txt

For best results, follow these guidelines:
You must fully specify URLs, as Google attempts to crawl them exactly as provided.
The text file must use UTF-8 encoding.
The text file should contain nothing but the list of URLs.
You can name the text file anything you wish. Google recommends giving the file a .txt extension (for instance, sitemap.txt).

thebigworld.co.uk