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

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

Listing and Indexing in Google - 2: Sitemaps

Don't understimate the importance of making a Sitemap for your website.

I'm not talking about the kind of site map you publish as an HTML file on your server so your visitors can see what topics your pages cover, and maybe get some navigational help. Navigational help, by the way is something they shouldn't need. if your site navigation is not completely straightforward and intuitive, then don't try and fix it by putting in a site map - get back to the drawing-board and reorganize it totally!

Sitemap.XML

The Sitemap I am talking about is an XML file you make available to Google to assist the Google engine in indexing your site - and it should help it get indexed that much quicker. This exercise is worthwhile doing, so set aside a little time to get the job done - I'm going to show you how to do it, now that you've verified your site.

I've looked at a number of online free sitemap generators like those at XML-Sitemaps.com and Auditmypc.com - however the one I finally ended up using for my own sites is phpSitemapNG which operates from your own server. It's available free from Enarion.net. If you're able, you can give a donation - it's certainly a valuable service.

The thing I like about phpSitemapNG is that it does a far more thorough job than the others. You have to do a litlle tweak to the resulting Sitemap to get Google to read it, but I figured out how to do that and I'll show you. The result of using this generator is a very comprehensive mapping of your site, and it also gives you an indication of the strength of linking between your site's pages.

Preparing phpSitemapNG

Go to http://enarion.net/google/ and click on the Download link on the left. You'll find the Enarion site has comprehensive instructions for downloading the script and putting it on your server. Save the contents of the zip file to your hard-drive and follow the instructions on the Enarion site for uploading files and folders to your server. CHMOD the files as directed. I've told you how to do that a couple of posts below.

Once you've done that, go to http://www.yourdomain.com/phpSitemapNG/ where you will find the Control Panel of your Sitemap Generator and execute the script. It will show you a graphical listing of all the files it finds, and you can direct it to overwrite the sitemap.xml file you've already placed in the root drive of your domain.

You now have on your own server a script that will create an up-to-date sitemap.xml file whenever you need it.

More tomorrow!
Patricia Howitt
1stClassWeb.Biz

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