Generating a Google XML Site map

This tutorial touches briefly on Google Site maps, and how to generate one using a free utility for submission to Google Site maps to help improve your sites indexing.

What is a Site Map?

A Site map is nothing more than a list of links for pages on your web site. They can also contain url's to text documents, and images - anything you like! Site maps can be in any format, they can be html documents with hyperlinks, they can be text files, or they can be XML documents - it really depends on what you want to use it for.

What is Google Site maps?

Google site maps is a part of Google for web masters that allows them submit a Site map in order to assist the Google Bots in crawling the pages in your web site. This is to ensure that no pages are missed out of the spider crawling process.

How do I use Google Site maps?

First of all, you will need to visit:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Once there you will need to register for an account before you can submit your web sites site map. Once you have done this, you will be presented with the option to add a site map to your site.

You enter the url to the site map file on your web site, (you can have more than one, and the primary one should really be in the root of your site), and click add. The first time you do this, you will need to verify the site map. Google will tell you how. All you need to do is put a blank text file in the same folder as your site map file and name it as google tells you. Then click the verify and all is done.

Simple.

How do I Build a Site Map?

This is simple. As mentioned above, a Site Map can be a normal HTML page that you maintain yourself by adding hyperlinks to all the pages on your site, like the site map for www.neutron2k.co.uk, or it can be in Google's Site Map Language which is a subset of XML, like the XML Site Map for www.neutron2k.co.uk. Please note that the XML site map for this site uses an XLST style sheet in order to format the XML.

Manually building an XML Site map in Google's Site Map XML format, although easy, can be a long and tedious process, so some people have built special spiders that crawl the pages of your site and index them into a Google XML Site Map that is ready for you to submit.

A very good one to use is available here:

http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

This one is a java based one so you will need to make sure you have a Java Runtime installed. The tool is very easy to use and pretty straight forward.

Once you have built your site map, save it in XML format and upload it to the location you gave google.

You can then tell google to re-submit the site map and it will download it again on its next crawl.