Google Sitemaps Made Easy
Google's own website describes sitemaps this way: The Sitemap Protocol allows you to inform search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap that uses the Sitemap Protocol is an XML file that lists URLs for a site. It also enables webmasters to include additional information about each URL (when it was last updated; how often it changes; how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
The Sitemap must:- Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag.
- Include a <url> entry for each URL as a parent XML tag.
- Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.
A sample Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags is shown below. The optional tags are in italics.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84">
< url >
< loc >http://www.example.com/</loc>
< lastmod >2005-01-01</lastmod>
< changefreq >monthly</changefreq>
< priority >0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
If this all seems to complicated, there are other options as well.
- This free and easy to use site map builder is fast, efficient and allows you to build a sitemap that can instantly be submitted to Google. The only requirement is a popular browser that supports java, such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and others.
- Sitemap Creator is helpful tool for webmasters. You can create sitemap manually or automatically with this tool. The best way is: first, start with Sitemap Creator, get results and adjust them according to your wishes.
- Pingoat sitemap creator generates google sitemaps of your website on the fly ! Pingoat can even automatically upload your sitemap to your ftp server and ping google