howto create a google sitemap

how to create a google sitemap

A sitemap, explained in its most basic form, is an index of the pagers on your website.  Having a sitemap makes navigation on the site faster and easier for human visitors, and gives a spider an easy reference of all pages that should be examined.  Having a sitemap is not a requirement for high PR, or SERP listings, but it will definitely make crawling the site easier, which amounts to more frequent crawling, and a higher degree of inclusion of all pages.

For your human visitors, a sitemap makes navigation a breeze.  They are able to look at a keyword related (well, it SHOULD be keyword related, anyway) list of possible pages on the site, and click on them to immediately find the information they came for.  Many websites make the sitemap available by placing it in a side or top bar, providing a consistent means of navigation from one section of the site to another.

There are many online, and free sitemap generation tools, among which these two are very popular:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Note that the first entry here is a link to the Google Webmaster Tools.  While this is not necessarily the best choice for generating your sitemap, it certainly won’t hurt your rankings to have the sitemap generated by the top rated search engine.  Also, since this is a Python script, it may not work on all sites, but should crawl most of them.

Once you’ve decided to make use a of a sitemap, it is imperative that you update the sitemap every time you update the pages.  An existing sitemap has the potential to bypass other methods of site identification, and letting it fall out of date could mean that updated and newly added pages are not discovered until they have been referred to by links from other sources, which could take some time to do.  All things considered, having an up-to-date sitemap is a good idea, and has the potential to vastly increase the inferred friendliness of your site to search engine spiders which crawl the site.  It is not a replacement for other SEO implementations, but is a fantastic addition to your overall marketing strategy.

Article written by SEOnotepad.com