Google sitemaps are a great way to increase traffic to your website. They allow search engines to crawl your site more intelligently, reducing the time it takes to index pages. A site map builder can be used to add a Google sitemap to your website. With a site map, you can tell search engines when your content is new or updated. This is especially useful for sites that only have pages that can be accessed through a search engine. What’s great about Google sitemap is that the submission process is fully automated once it’s set up. This means you’ll have more time to focus on other areas of your site. Webmasters who use sitemaps for their websites love them because they allow them to increase traffic without a lot of effort.
Getting Started
If you want to install Google sitemaps on your site, the first step is to check out the free Google sitemap tutorials on the google website. These tutorials will guide you through the process and answer most of the questions you may have. The next step will be to install a google sitemap generator program. There are many site map builder programs available on the internet that will help you create the sitemap for your site. Some of these builders can help you create an RSS feed, an HTML sitemap, or other url submission lists.
Creating Google Site Maps
When creating a Google sitemap, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. First, a sitemap must start with an "opening urlset tag" and end with a "closing urlset tag". Secondly, it must contain an "url entry" for each url, and a "loc child entry" for every url parent tag. Thirdly, sitemaps should not exceed 10MB in uncompressed mode. Fourthly, it should contain less than 50,000 URLs. Anything more than 50,000, and you’ll have to create several sitemap files! If all this sounds confusing, you’re in the right place. A site map builder can help you with the more complex and time-consuming parts of creating a sitemap.
Placing and Submitting Sitemaps
Your sitemap should be located in the root directory on your HTML server. Once you have the sitemap set up, you can verify the XML structure using one of the numerous free sitemap verification programs available online. Validation now can help you avoid submission errors and huge headaches later. Finally, you’ll need to submit the sitemap to Google. You can do this by creating a free google account or by logging in to your existing account (if you already have an account). Only first-time submissions require access to a Google account (resubmits have plenty of options). Once you’ve submitted your sitemaps to Google, your pages will be indexed much faster and you may also see a surge in traffic. To keep track of your site’s stats, you may want to request day crawler reports on a daily basis. You can also use follow up measures via your website map builder.