Google Sitemap Submission – A Simple Guide

I recently submitted my site to google and it really takes time to be crawled and listed in the google directory. Then at last my site was finally listed, but it doesn't last that long since the next day, I was out of the list. So what I did was log into my google account and see what happened. Google says that my sitemap was of this type “ http://mysite.com/sitemap.htm ” and the urls inside my map says “http:// www.mysite.com/sitemap.htm ” and it produces error on all my pages crawled which results to not being on the list anymore. So for those web designers and owners who are submitting their sites to google the first time, here's a simple guide for you in creating your sitemap.

What is a Sitemap file and why should I have one?

In general, there are two types of sitemaps. The first type of sitemap is a HTML page listing the pages of your site - often by section - and is meant to help users find the information they need.

XML Sitemaps - usually called Sitemaps, with a capital S - are a way for you to give Google information about your site.

We will be discussing on the second type which is the XML Sitemaps.

In its simplest terms, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. 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.

Sitemaps provide additional information about your site to Google, complementing their normal methods of crawling the web. They expect it will help them crawl more of your site and in a more timely fashion, but we there's no guarantee that URLs from your Sitemap will be added to the Google index. Sites are never penalized for submitting Sitemaps.

Here's an example of an XML Sitemap that you can use to submit to google.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

<url>

<loc>http://yoursite.com/index.htm</loc>

<lastmod>2008-07-18</lastmod>

<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

<priority>0.8</priority>

</url>

<url>

<loc>http:// yoursite.com/other.htm</loc>

<lastmod>2008-07-18</lastmod>

<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>

<priority>0.8</priority>

</url>

</urlset>

Change “yoursite” to whatever your site name is and do the same on your other pages enclosing them with <url></url>. Then submit that using the google webmaster tool.

Posted By: AxedbyDax - web and graphic artist