Listing and Indexing in Google - 3: Sitemaps

NOW - if you feed this sitemap.xml file to Google, Google will spider it and give you an error message, so I'm going to show you what to do with it to overcome that.

Altering Sitemap.xml

First of all, using FileZilla, download the sitemap.xml file from the root directory of your domain - just drag and drop it from the right-hand panel over to wherever you have navigated to on the left. You are going to open it with Notepad. Remember, when you want to open any kind of "text" file that does not have a .txt extension with Notepad, you need to change the "Files of Type"parameter at the bottom of the Open window from "Text Documents (*.txt)" to "All Files" so you can locate and open the file.

Open the sitemap.xml file in Notepad and look carefully at the first few lines of code. You will see just a few lines from the top the beginning of the url specifications that list out the files on your server. It begins with

<url> <loc>

Starting at fhe beginning of the sitemaps.XML code select eveything UP TO BUT NOT INCLUDING that first url loc code. Replace what you have selected with the following code:

<br /><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><br /><urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

Save your file. Upload it back onto your server, overwiting the one that's there.

Submitting Sitmap.xml to Google

Now you can log into your Webmasters Dashboard at Google, navigate to your domain (if you have only one you will be there already), select Sitemaps from the sidebar, and insert sitemap.xml in the box provided (you'll notice the root directory of your domain is already specified) and OK it.

That's a good job done, because now Google has something definitive to work with in indexing your site!.

Patricia Howitt
1stClassWeb.Biz

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market, marketing, business, indexing, advertising, google, lead capture, landing page, sitemap