Creating Sitemaps

Now that you have created your site, submitted your site to directories, gotten indexed, modified your pages for humans, and have begun your link building strategy, it is time to create your search engine friendly sitemap.

There are two reasons to create a good sitemap one is to add a way for users to quickly find information they are looking for and another is to prepare them for submission to Google and Yahoo.

In regards to Google here is what they say about submitting a sitemap to them:

Because you have created good content and a good website Google is ready to reward you by giving you better coverage. Now you can tell Google when a page was last updated on your site, and how frequently a page changes. This will result in better indexing, more updated indexing and also offers some tools:

As you can see from the screenshot above Google wants to help honest webmasters to improve their rankings. They will show you errors on your pages such as:

• HTTP Errors
• Unreachable URLs
• URLs that your robots.txt file is blocking them from crawling
• URLs that were not followed
• URLs that timed out due to server issues

They also provide free tools for analyzing your site and creating a good robots.txt file that works the way you intend.

Google also offers advice to improve your ranking in their SERPs. If you have not yet created a free Google Sitemaps account then you can do so at this link: Google Sitemaps.

Google also offer stats on when and what pages of your site they have crawled:

Google really does want to help and will give you detailed stats on diagnostics for your site, crawling, page analysis and indexing stats. Google will actually tell you their spiders results when crawling your site and give you detailed analysis and stats on any problems that were encountered. When you create good quality sites with good quality content, Google wants your sitemap and input so that they can help you rank higher in their index.

How to create a Google Sitemap

You need to create a good Google sitemap .xml file using their sitemap protocol. Don't let this scare you it is really very easy to do using free and readily available sitemap generators.

Google recommends Sourceforge as a solution for creating an XML sitemap according to their protocol. This solution is a bit advanced for a beginner.

I use xml-sitemaps.com solution, they have a free online sitemap generator that will create a sitemap ready for submission to Google and Yahoo and also gives you an HTML sitemap to add to your website.

Take a look at the seo2020 sitemap, it was generated using xml-sitemaps. We use the paid version of their software that we host here on the server so that whenever a new page is added, the sitemap automatically updates as well and for only $14.99 (USD) you can't beat it.

The software will give you text sitemaps (for Yahoo) and XML sitemaps (for Google) that are properly formatted and ready to submit.

The free online version of XML sitemaps is perfect for your smaller websites but as they grow, you will want to automate your sitemap building by having your server do it for you.

The paid version of the software will even ping Google to let them know that your sitemap is updated so that you don't have to submit an updated sitemap to them each time you make a change on your site. Once you can swing the $14.99 for this piece of software, get it.

Submit Your Sitemap to Google

Go to xml-sitemaps.com  and create your sitemap:

Enter the url of your sites index page, then indicate how often content on your site changes (choose weekly if you're following The Plan). For "Last modification" just leave the default checked (Use server's response). Leave "Priority" like it is and then click the start button.

When the system is done you will come to a page like this:

Item 1, in the example above is the file that you will give to Google for your sitemap. This file will tell Google which pages to crawl and how often your site is updated with new content.

Item 2 is the HTML version of the sitemap that you can upload to your server to act as your sitemap for human visitors and spiders.

Item 3 is a text file containing links in your sitemap for Yahoo. I will cover Yahoo in just a moment.

Upload Your Sitemap to Google

After you create a Google Sitemaps account go ahead and visit Google Sitemaps and follow their instructions to upload the sitemap file you just created. Once this is done just send them an updated sitemap periodically or purchase the sitemap software to have it done automatically.

Yahoo Sitemaps

Now that you are done with Google it is time to upload your Yahoo Sitemap to Yahoo. If you don't have a free Yahoo account then visit Yahoo and create one.

You will want to upload your yahoo sitemap to your server from item 3 above. You should name this file "urllist.txt".

Once you create your Yahoo account visit Yahoo Sitemaps and log in. You will see a screen like this:

Where is says "Enter the URL for your feed" go ahead and enter the URL where you uploaded your urllist.txt file to. Yahoo requires this feed file to be called this. After entering your URL go ahead and click the "Submit Feed" button and you're done.

At the time of this writing, Yahoo seems to be very slow indexing pages, much slower than Google. By submitting your sitemap to Yahoo you will speed the indexing process up considerably.

Conclusion

Submitting your sitemap to Google and Yahoo is the next best step after your site is listed with the directories and been made ready for human visitors. Adding a sitemap to your website also helps users to quickly find information that they are looking for.