| Newsletter September
9, 2006
Sitemaps How to for
Google and Yahoo! BETA's
Greetings,
If you are interested in improving
the indexing of your website for organic search with the
two biggest search engines on the planet, the new Google
Sitemap BETA and Yahoo! Search Site Explorer BETA are
something you should look at incorporating in your
website.
Yahoo! Site Explorer is here:
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Google Sitemap BETA is here:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html
Both services require that you
have an account, which is free.
Before you start looking at either
of these free services, your website needs a robots.txt
file. Don't have one? Search on Google or
Yahoo! for robots.txt generator and go use one of the
online generators to create a file for your web.
The file is a text file which you can create with
Notepad or any other ANSI text editing program.
Put it in the root of your web same level as your home
page.
Creating sitemaps that meet the
requirements of Google or Yahoo is best done with a
sitemap generating program. There are a number of
them online. NOT ALL OF THEM WORK CORRECTLY!
The best program I have found is
one that you can download for free. Note that it
runs only in Windows. Check out an excellent tool
you can download and run from your desktop,
GSiteCrawler: Google Sitemap Generator for Windows
Be sure to download the latest
update.
The process at both Google and
Yahoo! involves putting the sitemap in your website in
the root next to the home page, adding a verification
code and getting your sitemap approved and your right to
see the results at Google or Yahoo! with a form of
validation code either added to the <head> of your index
page or via a separate file.
For Google, I have been using XML
format (which is generated by GSiteCrawler) named
sitemap.xml and for Yahoo I have been using a text file
named urllist.txt. If you are using the
GSiteCrawler tool, it will do both files for you.
Be sure to include the css file it generates so you can
view the results of your xml file online.
When you add a new page to your
web, rerun the sitemap generator and put a new sitemap
in your web to include the new content.
I also recommend maintaining a
current html sitemap with a link from every page in your
web to the sitemap and a hyperlink to every page in your
web in the sitemap. You can look at my sitemap as
an example of one way to do this.
What are the benefits of doing
this? What I have seen, when working on
redesigning some neglected websites with content in the
Google Supplemental Index, is that within a couple of
weeks, the pages - assuming they have decent content -
are back in the main index. For new websites, with
these and all the other structural elements correctly in
place, every one I have done has come straight into the
index with rankings in a matter of 2-3 weeks or less.
With as much content as there is
on the internet, Google, Yahoo! and other search engines
are trying to find better ways to speed indexing time.
By helping them you are also helping yourself. It
is worth the effort.
Need help implementing these
improvements for your web? We can help you if you
need help, the cost is $100 per web.
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