How To Create and Submit xml Sitemap for Google So what is the sitemap.xml file and how to create and submit it? Video Version: What you need: Sitemap tool :http://www.auditmypc.com/xml-sitemap.asp Ftp software (or cPanel file manager): http://www.filezilla-project.org Google Webmaster Tools :http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ Text Version: In two steps it will be done. But first here’s why you do this: Google many not know about all your website pages. So the sitemap is a way to tell them about all your website pages. It will contain all webpages you want Google to list in search engines. Note: Just because you submit a sitemap to Google does not mean your website pages will get indexed. Submitting sitemap is really useful to websites which have a lot of pages which may not be easily found by Google spiders. Spiders are the software that scan the web for new pages. Step One Creating sitemap.xml File! Go to: http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp Click the right square banner and this opens up the tool. Note: If your browser asks you to install a flash plugin or some other plugin do so.
Now enter your website url, uncheck Respect “<a rel=”no follow”>” attribute and check Exclude images, then click play button. The reason you want to exlcude image files like http://www.linkbuilderexpert.com/Images/nbssccThinReport-2.jpg is because Google requires special tags in sitemap around images which this tool doesn’t include. I haven’t found a tool that creates these special tags, but don’t worry not submitting them isn’t a problem.
Clicki image to see bigger size Now click on Sitemap button at top of tool and wait until tool is finished. When it finishes the play button turns green again. Now click on Status column and take a note of anything marked in red in this column (they are 404 page not found pages). You can know which pages are linking to these problematic pages by right clicking on one of them and select Browse Subtree.
These are pages that you have to remove from sitemap. Right click and select Remove selected entries to remove them. If you have many Click the first one, press SHIFT on your keyboard and click the last one, right click and select Remove selected entries. Now click on Export, Sitemap XML
Now upload the sitemap.xml file to your website in the root. This means your sitemap.xml file will be like this: http://www.yourwebsitename.com/sitemap.xml You can use ftp software to upload files from your computer to your website. The one I use is called Filezilla at http://filezilla-project.org/ Last step is to submit the file to Google Webmaster Tools. First add your website to Google Webmaster Tools and then add a sitemap.xml file. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pretty straight forward to add your website:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools They will ask you to verify you’re the owner of the site, they will tell you how to do that it’s very easy to do. Once you do that click on the website url or the thumbnail image after you login to Google Webmaster Tools account and then from the left side select Sitemaps under Optimization.
On the right click on Add/Test sitemap red button and enter sitemap.xml in box, click Submit and you’re done.
Congratulations you now know what is a sitemap, why submit it to Google sitemap and how to create and submit one.