Sitemaps - why you need them and how to make them

Sitemaps are an essential tool to help you increase web traffic and you must have one in place whenever you make a website.

A sitemap allows the search engines to 'crawl' your site and work out which pages go to make up your website.

They're 'invisible' files, in that they're provided for the benefit of Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com, Windows Live! et al.

Google summarises the reasons why you need one on its site and I'll quote from them directly:

• Get Google's view of your site and diagnose problems See how Google crawls and indexes your site and learn about specific problems we're having accessing it.

• Discover your link and query traffic View, classify, and download comprehensive data about internal and external links to your site with new link reporting tools. Find out which Google search queries drive traffic to your site, and see exactly how users arrive there.

• Share information about your site Tell us about your pages with Sitemaps: which ones are the most important to you and how often they change. You can also let us know how you would like the URLs we index to appear.

Hopefully that's all it will take to convince you that this is important stuff.

It's quite advanced though, and not for the novice.

You need to have a basic knowledge of FTP and be able to upload files to your website.

Even if you're not quite at that stage yet, read on, as this is something you'll need to do when you've decided on your URL and published your first pages.

How to create sitemaps

I’ve discovered a free website tool which does the job for you - simply, quickly, easily and without loads of techno-babble and it’s called sitemapspal.com.

I've tried a lot of tools for generating sitemaps and this is my favourite.

It's free, but there are some advanced services available for a nominal amount.

The procedure is as follows:

• Generate a sitemapspal.com sitemap

• Upload it to the highest level that you have access to on your website … alongside your index page basically.

• Submit it to Google … and anybody else who’ll accept it.

• Let the search engines crawl all over your lovely content so that they can start to get in indexed properly

This is an SEO (search engine optimisation) essential ... you must let the search engines know that you're there and open for business.

How to read sitemaps

To generate your sitemapspal.com code, just type the URL of your website into the yellow box on the front page of the site and click on 'submit'.

It will generate the code that you need, cut and paste this into a notepad file and label it sitemap.xml (or something more obscure if you don't want people to look at it).

Don't worry too much about what the sitemap code looks like, but you'll get the gist of it, it basically shows the search engines exactly what's on the site, how important it is, when it was last updated and so on.

You will need to upload that file to the highest level that you can in your website, usually wherever your homepage is located.

Become a Google webmaster

To submit your sitemap once you've registered follow this process:

• Go to the dashboard
• Type the URL on your website and add your site to the dashboard

• Once you've done that, you'll see that you have two options ... to verify your site and add your sitemap
• Click on 'add' and select 'Add General Web Sitemap'

• You will be asked to add the extension of your sitemap file ... this will be something like sitemap.xml
• You will also need to verify your site ... basically to prove that it belongs to you

• I suggest you go for the 'Upload an HTML' file' option ... you'll be given a filename like 'google752f5e20xxxxx968.html'... just open a notepad file and save it as 'google752f5e20xxxxx968.html'
• Upload this file to the same place that your sitemap and homepage are located, then ask Google to carry out the verification

If it's not okay, it will tell you what the errors are, but with a straightforward website with no redirects, using sitemapspal.com, the process should go through without a hitch.

Who wants to see your sitemap?

If you use blogging software like Wordpress to create your website, you can build in a lovely sitemap addon which automatically updates your sitemap and submits it to the key search engines.

However, if you've opted for a simple HTML website, you'll have to do this manually with sitemapspal.com.

You need to make sure that you submit your sitemap to the 'big four' search engines:

• Google: Submit URL to Google

• Yahoo!: Submit URL to Yahoo!

• Bing: Submit to Bing

• Ask.com: Submitted via the URL http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml ... note that you have to enter information into the URL as indicated, copy and paste it into your browser, then click on 'Go'. You'll get a confirmation if you've done it correctly.

Sitemaps are an essential to help you increase web traffic so do bear them in mind as you start to develop your home internet business.

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