Carl’s SEO & Web Design Blog

In indexing a site in the search engines, Google first finds your home page and saves the information on that page to it’s index. Then Google comes back later (generally weeks) and crawls down your site indexing the rest of your site from the links on your home page. Unfortunately, for most sites these links are Flash, JavaScript, or dynamic links. Google has a hard time following anything but text links. And text links look ugly compared to those other types.

To solve this, you should create a site map page that has links to the other pages. Then you put one text link on your home page - normally at the bottom of the page - to this sitemap page that has text links to all the other pages. Then, when Google starts its crawl-down, it finds the text link on your home page, follows it to your sitemap page, and then finds the other links and indexes the rest of your pages. Even a small site, such as 5 or 6 pages, should still use a site map.

Google has tried to help the users here by providing a sitemap generator that you can use at no charge to create a special sitemap page. The generated page is an XML file. Once you generate this you can put it on your server, tell Google it’s there, and you’re done. You don’t need to modify any other files. Google hopes other search engines adopt there standard (that’s why the generator is free).

Obviously, this generator can help your ranking in Google. It will never hurt your rank. To get started, go to the intro page at:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

To create the sitemap for Google, go to:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview

We suggest setting up a free account on Google for this if you haven’t all ready. This permits you to get additional and interesting statistical information on your site. Use the Help button on this page to get started on using the tools.

The problem with Google’s sitemap generator is that it requires python on your server. My server doesn’t have that. Several third party companies have come up with sitemap generators that create this XML sitemap file without python and these are often free to use. My favorite is at:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Here is the simple strategy for creating a winning sitemap file and getting it
working for you:

1. Use the above third-party xml-sitemaps.com generator to create the XML and HTML files. Just enter your URL and let’er rip.
2. Transfer both of these files to your host server using an FTP program. Put them in the main directory with your other main files.

3. Go to:
   http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview and set up an account in Google if you don’t have one.

4. Choose to add a sitemap.

5. Specify the path to your sitemap XML file.

6. Tell Google to go.

Google will then check your file and notify you if the file was OK. This takes only a few minutes or so.

That’s it! Use the sitemap.html file with other search engines that don’t support the Google’s XML format yet. For those, just modify your home page with a text link to the sitemap.html file.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 21st, 2006 at 11:16 am and is filed under Google, Web Design, Search engine optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.