In this article a Google Sitemap will be defined; the importance of having a Google sitemap as it relates to Google and how to create a Google sitemap.
A sitemap is a page with a listing of URLs or web site addresses used to inform search engines that you have web page available for crawling or indexing. Submitting a Google Sitemap is extremely valuable because it will speed up the process Google uses to crawl or index pages with a given web site. This does two things:
1) Makes it possible for people to find your site quicker, because if a page is not indexed with Google it cannot be searched for.
2) Once a page is indexed or crawled, it can receive a page ranking from Google. If your pages are ranked higher for particular keyword phrases, this will equal people being able to find your site that much quicker.
How to create the sitemap using FTP
The first thing that needs to be done when creating a sitemap is to sign up for an account with Google sitemaps. To do so go to www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps
. Then you will need to input a website address for the webmaster tools. Once done it going to need you to verify your website with Google sitemaps. To do so click on the verify link, where you will have two choices to verify your site 1) creating an html page or 2) using code provided to put into the meta data area. The easier of the two options will be creating an html page. Google sitemaps will give you a specific name to title the web page, so create the web page with that name and then using FTP, load the page to your web site root directory. Once you’ve done this, you will be able to successfully verify your web site.
Now that the site is verified, you need to create the sitemap. An excellent and easy place to go to create your sitemap is www.sitemapdoc.com. Once there you input your web site address and hit enter then the tool will go through and index all of your pages for you, then you need to check off the pages you want to keep. You need to specify the change frequency, the options you have are: daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and never. It is very important that you choose the best option the best fits how often you change a given web page. If you choose daily for a page and you don’t change it on a daily basis Google will pick up on that and you will lose your ranking for that page. Also you need to select the priority level of the page it will run on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0, 1.0 being the highest. Now that the options are specified for each page click on Google sitemap this will produce a bunch of XML code to copy and paste into notepad and save the file as sitemap.xml then using FTP upload the file to the root directory of the web site.
Now go back to the Google sitemaps account and click on add sitemap, the type of sitemap you want is a general web sitemap, then input the address for the sitemap and click add and you are done.
