One of the quickest single methods to get a search engine to spider your site is to create and submit a XML Sitemap.

In case you don’t know, a Sitemap is a file containing the location of the Webpages that make up your site.  There are some limitations to Sitemaps and that is they can not exceed 50,000 pages or 10 MB in size.  This is fine for most people, so I won’t go into the details about how to create Sitemaps for sites that exceed 50,000 pages.

Sitemaps may also include data about each Webpage such as the date of the last modification, change frequency, and priority.  On the sites I develop, I am only concerned with submitting the URL’s and priority.

The easiest way to create a Sitemap for your Website is to use an Online tool.  If your Website is less then 500 pages, consider using a free XML Sitemap Creator.  It’s a very easy tool to use and permits global last modification date, change frequency, and page priority.  Simply input your URL and set your change frequency, last modification date preference, page priority, and click the white start button.  It will analyze your site and, once completed, allow you to download compressed and uncompressed versions of your Sitemap.  Unless you have a large site, the uncompressed Sitemap is all you need.

Once you have downloaded the uncompressed Sitemap, you want to open it up with a text editor.  The first thing that needs to be done is to make sure/change your main page to a priority of 1.0.  You may also want to change the priority or change frequency for specific pages in your site.

Once you have modified your Sitemap to your liking, upload it to your site’s root directory.  It should read sitemap.xml, and be accessible on the Internet by http://yourspecifieddomain.com/sitemap.xml.  Congratulations, you now have a working Sitemap to submit to the search engines!

To make sure that the search engines can find your Sitemap, it’s a good idea to reference it in your robots.txt file.  Enter the following code into your robots.txt file.  But be sure to replace the yourspecificdomainhere.com with your own address:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://yourspecificdomainhere.com/sitemap.xml

If you don’t know much about robots.txt files and just want to get your Sitemap submitted, download a sample robots.txt file here.  Unzip and open the text file and change yourspecificdomainhere.com to your Website address.  Once that is completed, save and upload the file to your sites root directory.  When a search engine that supports XML Sitemaps visits your site, it will now know the location of your Sitemap.  This may be especially useful in the future as more smaller search engines support XML Sitemaps.

Now that you have created and uploaded your Sitemap, it’s time to submit it to the search engines.  Let’s move on to the quick Sitemap submission section.

Quick Launch Index Guide Home

Tags: Create Sitemap, XML Sitemaps

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 12th, 2008 at 1:17 am and is filed under Quick Launch Index Guide. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.