Building Effective Sitemaps
Sitemaps Sitemaps can be broken into two camps – one for humans, one for spiders. Both, however, serve the same purpose – they house the entire collection of URLs from your website and make it easy for users (humans & spiders) to find all your content form a single source point. Humans will need the data broken into logical, easy to read sections. We function best when things are presented in such a manner that we can read down a page, find the section we want, and within that section, the page with the content we desire. Spiders, though, just want a simply list of URLs – they don’t care a whit about descriptions, layout spacing or font type and color. Spiders simply want the most efficient way to see all your URLs so they can get to all of them (and into all of your unique content) as quickly and easily as possible. Humans don’t need every page listed, either. If your website is divided into sections and each section has an “index” type page listing all the relevant pages for that section, your sitemap might only contain each section’s “index” page. Your users will fin the content they’re after form that section easily enough. Spiders, though, want to see every page – that’s their default (find and index EVERY page). If you want them to index as many of your pages as possible, make it easy and give them what they want. XML v. Text Since Google is the biggest supporter and user of sitemaps, it makes sense for many folks to focus efforts on what Google likes to see. The location your sitemap info ends up in is programmed in XML, so it makes sense to use a sitemap generator that outputs an XML file. If you prefer, they’ll happily accept a plain text version with a simple list of URLs in the document – either will work. If you only have a couple of hundred pages, using a simple text document will be fine. It’s easy to maintain, doesn’t take up much space and is Google-friendly. If your site has several thousand pages, though, XML is the way to go. Plenty of tools exist which will create the file for you, so don’t worry that you’ll have to spend countless nights cutting and pasting URLs into a file somewhere. Nope, you’ll just tell the tool where to go and it’ll come back in a few minutes with a completed file and ask you where to put it. Regardless of the format used, the sitemap file always goes into the root of the website. You should be able to find it by simply typing in the filename after your domain in the address bar. Next up you’ll need a Sitemap Account with Google to submit the thing. The reason for submitting it is simple. If you add a new page, you’ll update the sitemap. By pinging Google through your sitemap account, you’re suggesting they visit you again the next time the Googlebot leaves the garage. If you don’t let them know they’ll eventually get around to you, but why wait? Some useful tools: Great info here with this free XML sitemap generator tool: http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp Straight from Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/sitemap-generator.html Interesting tool that creates an XML sitemap from your plain text file: http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/article.htm?node=154 Now, constructing a simple plain text sitemap is very simple. Just open a text editor such as UltraEdit or you can even use software such as Dreamweaver. Start copying and pasting your URLs into this document, one per line. When you’re done, save the doc and load it into the root of your site, ensuring it’s labeled as a .txt file. You’re done. Next up makes sure you have a Google Sitemaps account. www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview?hl=en Then submit your map through the system and follow the directions. You’ll be asked to verify things, so you’ll be sent a line of code to drop into a file and place on the root of the site again. When Google sees this done, it’ll accept your map and you’re in! I specifically omitted the suggestion of using NotePad on your PC because as a Microsoft product, it sometimes leaves “artifacts” in documents – nothing you can see, but odd bits and pieces which trip up spiders. It’s unintentional, but true – so I never recommend using NotePad for anything regarding editing text docs for your website.
