Basic Web SEO – Part 1 – Google Sitemaps
I’m going to write a series of articles on SEO showing all that I have learnt and tips I have picked up. SEO is becoming an essential part of every web developers skill set, and those without it will be left behind, and possibly without work! In all of these posts, I will use a fictitious website (at the moment) – www.thelawnman.com.au – to illustrate the examples. In my first artilce, I am going to talk about Google Sitemaps.
Google XML Sitemaps have been around for a while now and it is probebly a good time to starting to become familiar with them. They can help you to achieve up to date indexing in Google, which in turn should help you with search placement.
A Google XML Sitemap allows web developers to provide Google directly with a master list of all their site’s critical pages for indexing/crawling. The sitemap data is recorded inside an XML file and it includes a list of URL’s belonging to the site, the date the page was last modified date, how often the site is updated and the sites priority.
These Google XML sitemaps generally helps Google index your site but if your site is small (say under 10 pages) or is not updated very often, the Google XML Sitemap may not help much at all, especially if your site is already inside the index. It helps most with trying to keep the latest postings/versions of your page in Google. Larger sites with lots of pages should benefit as sometimes not all of your pages are appearing in the Google index.
Google XML sitemaps will in many cases not improve your page rankings, but by having the most current version of your site in Google’s index, this can help improve your results in Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). This is due to you being able to make an update to a page and Google’s index will have this page updated more quickly than without the XML sitemap. This effectively means that with more frequent spidering you can help get your latest site version in the index, and this should help with your sites rankings.
If your site is small or your prefer to you can create your XML sitemap manually. The structure is not difficult to follow and even an XML novice will be able to follow the structure of the XML sitemap. If you prefer automated tools that require little changes to the output, then I can recommend VIGOS GSitemap which is a free, easy to use tool that will help you create your XML sitemaps with ease.
Here is an example sitemap:
<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.thelawnman.com.au/</loc>
<lastmod>2006-08-29T16:58:33+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>Fortnightly</changefreq>
<priority>0.7</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.thelawnman.com.au/work-request.html</loc>
<lastmod>2006-08-29T16:58:33+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>Monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.thelawnman.com.au/current-work.html</loc>
<lastmod>2006-08-29T16:58:33+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>Daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.7</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
Submitting your completed XML Sitemap to Google is relatively straightforward. After the file has been created the first thing you want to do is upload the file to your server, preferably at the root level eg. http://www.thelawnman.com.au/sitemap.xml. Now you will need to log into the Sitemap console using your Google account login. From here you can add a site to your account. To do this, simply enter your top level domain where it says “Add Site” eg. http://www.thelawnman.com.au/. This will add the domain to your account and allow you to then submit the XML sitemap you have created. You will now be taken to the site summary page for this site. You will see a text link that says “Submit a Sitemap”. Click on this link to enter the online location of your XML sitemap. Once you have entered in the location, click “Add Web Sitemap” and it is recorded.
So, that’s it. It is quite a simple process to get a sitemap added into Google. There is one final thing that you can do and I recommend you perform this optional step – you should verify your Sitemap. This can be easily done by placing a specific meta tag on your home page provided by Google. Verification allows you to access crawl stats and other valuable information regarding your Google listing.
Google XML sitemaps are great. We love Google!