How To Get Your Web Page Into Google in 7 Day's

Sitemaps

Each time a search engine or crawler visits your site, it doesn’t stay very long. It is important to make the most of every visit so that your pages get updated in the search results quickly. You could just leave the search engine to crawl randomly and hope that it finds all your important pages, or you tell it where to look. Which idea sounds best to you? This is where sitemaps come in handy.

Not only do search engines look for a sitemap each time they visit your site, you can also submit the sitemap to the search engines as a “menu” for them to scan when they visit. This is far more effective than simply asking a search engine to visit your top domain name.

As usual, there is always more than one way this can be achieved.

Text Sitemaps

This is the simplest to create. All this file contains is a list of all the URLs for your site. All you have to do is create a standard .TXT file in the root of your domain and place the full URL for each page, one URL per line. Traditionally this file is called “sitemap.txt” and will look something like this:

http://www.kimptoncomputers.co.uk/index.htm
http://www.kimptoncomputers.co.uk/about_us.htm
http://www.kimptoncomputers.co.uk/contact_us.htm
http://www.kimptoncomputers.co.uk/sitemap.htm

XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps are more detailed. A full explanation can be found on the Google website

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html

A basic XML sitemap would look something like this;

<urlset xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>http://www.kimptoncomputers.co.uk/</loc>
<priority>0.6000</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>
http://www.kimptoncomputers.co.uk/tutorials/blooming-jasmine-flower-green-tea.html</loc>
<priority>0.5000</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

It is certainly well worth reading up on the parameters of the XML code and implementing it. This is particularly important with large sites with many pages.

HTML Sitemaps

This type of sitemap is intended for the human user of your site to help them navigate your site if they cant find what they are looking for. But it has another valuable use which is often overlooked.

As I mentioned earlier, as a search engine crawls the internet and finds a page, it follows all the links on that page. Understanding this, it makes sense then to have a page near the root of your domain which, when found allows the crawler to visit EVERY page in your domain. If the crawler hasn’t already made use of your sitemap.txt or sitemap.xml files, this page will certainly make sure the search engine gets to see all of your site. Whilst you don’t need to have such a page, I highly recommend you create one. Take a look at Kimpton Computers website home page.

http://www.kimptoncomputers.co.uk

At the bottom, right hand side you will notice a small link called “sitemap”. In all of those sites where I have only been able to submit the main URL of my site, their crawlers will visit this page, follow the links, and end up at my sitemap.htm page.

http://www.kimptoncomputers.co.uk/sitemap.htm

From here, the crawler will follow all these links, completely scanning the website. Perfect.

Robot Files

Robot files are slightly different. They deny the search engines access to the folders or files detailed within. Not all search engine crawlers read these files, but the main ones do. This comes in handy if you have pages half built or secure areas which you don’t want them to visit. They are very straight forward, just like a sitemap.txt file this is called a robots.txt file and will look something like this:

# DO READ THESE FILES
User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.kimptoncomputers.co.uk/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.kimptoncomputers.co.uk/sitemap.txt

# Ignore Main Folders
User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder1
Disallow: /folder2

# Ignore FrontPage Folders
User-agent: *
Disallow: /_borders
Disallow: /_derived
Disallow: /_fpclass
Disallow: /_overlay
Disallow: /_private
Disallow: /_themes
Disallow: /_vti_bin
Disallow: /_vti_cnf
Disallow: /_vti_log
Disallow: /_vti_map
Disallow: /_vti_pvt
Disallow: /_vti_txt

# Ignore Shop Folders
User-agent: *
Disallow: /shop/admin

Again, you don’t have to use this type of file, but in larger sites, it can make the crawling of your site faster and more efficient.

Submitting Your Sitemap To The Search Engines

To speed up the time it takes for the search engines to find your sitemaps and then list your pages within the directory, you need to submit your sitemaps directly to the search engines. Many crawlers will simple find them during their standard crawl of your site, but it still helps to manually submit them.

Google and Yahoo have created sophisticated webmaster admin area's which you can manage all aspects of your site including the submission of your sitemaps. You will need to create an account at each of these sites to manage yours.

Google - https://www.google.com/accounts/Login

Yahoo - https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

MSN / Live and Ask do not yet have webmaster admin areas for the management of your domain, but there is a little known methods of submitting your sitemaps directly into their directory which will be cued and read soon after.

Alter the following code to match your URL and enter it into a web browser. Both of these codes have a sitemap named .XML, but you can also enter a .TXT sitemap too.

NEW - www.Bing.com (Microsoft's new search engine)

Using your Microsoft Live account, login and submit your sitemap in the same way as you did for Google & Yahoo. We are informed that MSN / Live search engines use this too. Visit http://www.bing.com/webmasters/