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How to Create a Google Sitemap

Contributor
By Lady_Glass
eHow Contributing Writer

Creating a sitemap is an essential task for ensuring Google can effectively find your website. Consisting of XML code, sitemaps tell Google and other search engines about all the pages in your website, and they include any links that might be missed during the normal index process. You can manually create a sitemap using a few lines of XML code or find and use any of the free, third-party site-map generators available on the Web.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy
Instructions

    Create a Sitemap Manually

  1. Step 1

    Use a text editor such as TextEdit or Notepad to create a new text file.

  2. Step 2

    Enter these lines of XML code at the top: "<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">."

  3. Step 3

    Create URL entries for all of the links in your website. The "<loc>" is the URL address of your website, "<lastmod>" is a date stamp for when your website was last modified and "<changefreq>" indicates how often your Web page content changes. Options include "Always," "Hourly," "Daily," "Weekly," "Monthly" and "Yearly."

  4. Step 4

    Enter a value of 0.0 to 1.0 in the "<priority>" tag of the URL entry. Sitemaps.org states this about priority numbers: "The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites---it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers. The default priority of a page is 0.5.". Enter the full URL entry code as follows:
    <url>
    <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2009-11-06</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
    </url>

  5. Step 5

    Enter the closing "</urlset>" tag after your last URL entry.

  6. Step 6

    Name your file "sitemap" and save your file with the ".xml" extension.

  7. Step 7

    Upload the file to your Web server, then submit the file to Google. Log in to your Webmaster Tools account and click the "Submit your sitemap" link to add the file to Google's index.

  8. Create a Sitemap with a Sitemap Generator

  9. Step 1

    Go to a sitemap generator website such as XML-Sitemaps.com to automatically create your XML file.

  10. Step 2

    Enter the URL of your website and include the full address.

  11. Step 3

    Select or enter a change frequency. This tells Google and other search engines how often your Web page content is updated.

  12. Step 4

    Select or enter a last modification date. This date stamp indicates the last time your page was edited.

  13. Step 5

    Enter a "Priority" number for your website. Sitemaps.org states this about priority numbers: "The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. This value does not affect how your pages are compared to pages on other sites---it only lets the search engines know which pages you deem most important for the crawlers. The default priority of a page is 0.5."

  14. Step 6

    Click the "Start" button to initiate the generation and download of your XML file.

  15. Step 7

    Upload the XML file to your Web server, then submit the file to Google. Log in to your Webmaster Tools account and click the "Submit your sitemap" link to add the file to Google's index.

Tips & Warnings
  • If you have more than one website, you can add all of the links in one sitemap file and submit this to Google. If you use Google Sites to create your website, the sitemap is automatically created for you. You can download third-party extensions for HTML text editors such as Dreamweaver to automatically generate your sitemap file.
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