Make mapping a priority
| Make mapping a priority | |
08 July 2005
Along with XML feeds, the hot web site tweak at the moment is submitting to Google Sitemaps to ensure your site is constantly indexed by Google. Although this latest Google development won’t necessarily improve a site’s ranking, it is a quick, low maintenance way to make certain new content is indexed as quickly as possible. The ‘but’ in this story is that webmasters have to submit an XML generated file that pushes site updates directly to Google. By now, most people will be familiar with the orange XML logo displayed on news sites and blogs to allow users to subscribe and view content via an XML/RSS reader. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a smart form of coding that enables web site content to be automatically distributed as soon as it’s posted online. Sites wishing to syndicate their content (see HIE newsfeeds) create a newsfeed to which anyone can subscribe. And, in this instance, the ‘anyone’ happens to be the premier internet search engine. Now, this all sounds like good news so far…But (there’s that word again) what Google is, in practical terms, asking is for web site owners to replace Google’s spider, the software application used to crawl the web and index sites. This, though, especially for commercial web sites, may not be such a bad thing. After all, web site pages are being added to the internet at an alarming rate, swamping even the indexing resources of the largest search engines. By being given the responsibility for site indexing, web site owners will now have more control over search engine indexing and the opportunity to improve the quality and freshness of search engine results. The XML file, for example, will allow webmasters to rank the importance of the pages within their site. Most people would want their home page to have top priority followed next, perhaps, by a page on their top selling product or service etc. Other data contained within the XML file includes when a particular page was last modified and how often it is updated, weekly, monthly or hourly. Before any of this is possible, first we have to generate the XML file. Unless you’re familiar with installing scripts on servers or using PHP, the easiest way to generate an XML sitemap file is to use one of the many online generator sites. These sites are free to use and Google keeps a list of them under the heading Online Generators One such example of a third party generator is http://www.xml-sitemaps.com. It’s easy to use and enables up to 500 pages to be mapped. All you need do is enter your URL, wait for their spider to crawl your site and, when notified, download the resulting XML file. The XML sitemap file can be customised to set page priority and frequency and then uploaded to the root directory of your site as sitemap.xml. Next, let Google know about your sitemap and you’re away. Most third party sitemap generators enable users to submit directly from their sites. However, registered Google users can submit from a control panel and see when their sitemap was last downloaded by Google for processing. Er, but, there’s a slight snag. A third party generated sitemap is a snapshot in time. When you add new pages to your site, the sitemap file will have to be updated too. For most small to micro-sized businesses this should not present too much of a problem unless they’re adding new pages on a daily basis. In these circumstances, they instead should be looking at PHP scripting or the Google Python generator. Useful links | |