There are some fraudsters out there trumpeting a secret way into Google’s search engine, and charging for this info. It’s actually not much of a secret and no guarantee you will  get into Google if you don’t do some other things right. Truly, it’s more an extra tool and it’s free. So what’s this amazing “secret”? It’s an area created by Google called Google Webmaster Tools. The goal of Google’s webmaster tools? A simple (and free) way to make your site more Google-friendly. In short, Google allows you to upload and link your sitemap to your domain. By uploading a sitemap Google gets a better view of your site, helps you diagnose any problems (such as broken links), and lets you share info with them to improve your site’s visibility (for example in their mobile index).

Sitemaps are the backbone of Google’s Webmaster tools. As Google points out, there are two types of sitemaps. The first type of sitemap is a HTML page listing the pages of your site and is meant to help users find the information they need. The second one, which is the focus of Google are XML sitemaps. Google goes on to describe why using sitemaps is so important:

“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 Flash.
• 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.

You can also use a Sitemap to provide Google with additional information about your pages, including:

• How often the pages on your site change. For example, you might update your product page daily, but update your About Me page only once every few months.
• The date each page was last modified.
• The relative importance of pages on your site. For example, your home page might have a relative importance of 1.0, category pages have an importance of 0.8, and individual blog entries or product pages have an importance of 0.5. This priority only indicates the importance of a particular URL relative to other URLs on your site, and doesn’t impact the ranking of your pages in search results.”

The benefit of using sitemaps is that it complements Google’s normal method of crawling the web. One important thing to note though, that Google clearly states on their overview of Webmaster tools : “Using this protocol does not guarantee that your web pages will be included in search indexes. (Note that using this protocol will not influence the way your pages are ranked by Google.)”

So now that you know a little more about Google Sitemaps, let’s find out the steps to getting you sitemap into Google. First you need a Google Account. If you have a Gmail account, or use any Google service, you have a Google Account. Head over to the Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard, and click to add a site. The next step is to verify you actually own the site. That is by adding either some code in the from of a meta tag or by uploading an HTML file to your server.

Almost instantaneously after you implement one of the two methods offered, you will get some helpful info about your site from Google. It will include basic index stats. The next step is to add your sitemap to Google. Select “add” under the sitemap column the Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard. You will be presented a drop gown menu. For our purposes, and to get started, choose “General Web Sitemap”. You will be asked where on your sever Google can find your sitemap. The best place to add it will be at the root of your domain and to name the file sitemap.xml, which is the default.

Creating the sitemap for Google is easy. You can do it yourself. These are the steps:

1. Create a text file and save it with a .xml extension.
2. Add the following to the top of the file:
   

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

3. Add the following to the bottom of the file:

     </urlset>

4. Create an entry for each URL. The tag is required; the others are optional.

   <url>
       <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
       <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
       <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
       <priority>0.8</priority>
      </url>

5. Upload your Sitemap to your site

You can read more info from Google on choosing the appropriate frequency and priority.

Personally for larger sites, we’d like to recommend a couple tools. If you choose to do it on your computer, the best (free) tool for download is Gsite Crawler. If you are more comfortable with an online solution, and you are okay with a 500 page limit, this is the best online XML sitemap generator. Google offers a page of third party solutions, but many of the links are dead, or the software does not work. Whatever you choose most tools will create a sitemap for you without any fuss, and all you will need to do is upload it up your Google account.

Now if you have a site over 50000 pages, you need to a do a little bit more work. You should create multiple Sitemaps and submit a Sitemap index file. Google’s recommendation is as follows:

“Provide Google with a simple text file that contains one URL per line. For example:

www.example.com/file1.html
www.example.com/file2.html

For best results, follow these guidelines:

1. You must fully specify URLs as Google attempts to crawl them exactly as provided.
2. Each text file can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. If you site includes more than 50,000 URLs, you can separate the list into multiple text files and add each one separately.
3. The text file must use UTF-8 encoding. You can specify this when you save the file (for instance, in Notepad, this is listed in the Encoding menu of the Save As dialog box).
4. The text file should contain no information other than the list of URLs.
5. The text file should contain no header or footer information.
6. You can name the text file anything you wish. Google recommends giving the file a .txt extension to identify it as a text file (for instance, sitemap.txt).

You should upload the text file to your server, generally to the highest-level directory you want search engines to crawl.”

Once you’ve created this file, in whatever way you choose, you can submit it to Google. Once it’s uploaded Google will set you in the queue and begin the process of crawling your site. Should there be any issues, or diagnostic issues, these will appear in you Google Webmaster Dashboard after some time. Checking in on your dashboard on a regular basis is important to ensure you are being seen the way you wish by Google.

Also note, Google adheres to Sitemap Protocol 0.9 as defined by sitemaps.org. The Sitemap Protocol is a dialect of XML for summarizing Sitemap information that is relevant to web crawlers. Sitemaps created for Google using Sitemap Protocol 0.9 are therefore compatible with other search engines that adopt the standards of sitemaps.org, which includes Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

So simply put, using sitemaps is the web equivalent of adding a table of contents to a book. Sure a book can be a bestseller without one, but it makes it so much easier for the reader to find what they are looking for. Should you need more help with implementing your sitemap we are more than happy to help just contact Mark8t E-Marketing Solutions today.