Google Sitemaps and your SEO Strategy

Like many of you, I am always trying to find as much information as I can on Search Engine Optimization. And also like many of you, I am doing it myself. I read online and buy books on search engine optimization and many of them all say the same things, just in a different way.

Sadly with most search engines the solution is simply the number of links pointing back to your site. The search engines feel that they can control the quality of their search results by focusing on the websites that have a large number of links pointing to them. Simply put, it's a popularity vote. Their reasoning is that if nobody else thinks your site is important, why should they index it.

That doesn't mean you can't get your site indexed though. In 2005 Google created a submission system called Google sitemaps. Yahoo soon followed with one of their own as well.

Aside from taking advantage of this tool to insure your site indexing, Google sitemaps also provide a variety of statistics related to your site. You can see what the search engines see in regards to pages that they can't find, your page rank and even search statistics.

"That's really great Ben, but my site is HUGE and I don't know anything about xml and how to format these things". Well I had the same problem, I have sitemaps with over 6000 links in them, and frankly I was not about to try and manually create a sitemap with all of those links, I just don't have the time. So I went ahead and created a smaller sitemap of all of my sites with a dozen or less elements included so that I would at least get something indexed.

That was until I stumbled over a sitemap generator that did all of the work for me. There are others out there but this one has a web page that you can go to and have them generate your sitemap, as well as a desktop version. It's called the ROR Sitemap Generator. And all you have to do is key in your domain name and let it do the rest.

There is also another great tool which also handles the Yahoo sitemap and that program is GSiteCrawler.

Save the sitemap to your directory, and viola! I used the desktop version personally because I've found that it performs quicker and doesn't hang up on sites with thousands of links. They also have the "ROR Feed Generator" which I've used with equal success.

Oh Yeah, and the best part, these tools are free. You can find them at www.rorweb.com and www.gsitecrawler.com. You will be able to let this tool create your sitemap, save the generated map as sitemap.xml, upload it to your website root directory, then log into your Google Sitemap account and enter the path to your sitemap and let google do the rest.

I recently did this for a friend and his site was indexed in 3 days. That's uncommon, it might take up to 30 days, but you'll get your pages indexed on google, and many of the other search engines will be able to index your site now too. Is it guaranteed? No. But I've had 100% success getting my pages and sites indexed personally.

Just in case you need help with Google Sitemaps, here's how you want to do the complete process.

Set up your account with Google Sitemaps at www.google.com/webmaster/sitemaps
Generate your sitemap.
Place your sitemap in your root directory of your website.
Log into your Google account.
Click the "Add" tab to add a new sitemap with your account.
Select the "General Website Sitemap" option.
Click Next.
Put in your domain name and path to your sitemap.xml file.
Click "Add Web Sitemap" 10. Take a deep breath, let out a big sigh, let the dog out or take him for a walk.

Now you've taken a major step in the right direction with search engines and utilizing Google Sitemaps with your SEO strategy. I hope this helps anyone trying to increase their site visibility using the D.I.Y. method, which is all many of us can afford.

Thanks for reading and much success.

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