Build A Site Map

What is a site map?

"Overview of the navigational structure of a website, acting like a Table of Contents, and used to orient users and show them the scope of the site. Site maps can be textual or visual. Usually each location is an active link, enabling a user to move directly to that section. Site maps can also be important sources of links for search engine spiders to follow."

It is a good idea to have a navigational site map for your visitors. If you decide to create one, make sure you update it as your update your site. I just deleted mine. I have to build a new one. I took a look at it and discovered I had about 30 pages listed on it. This site currently has over 1000 pages. I think it's going to take me a while to create a new map.

We are not talking about navigational sites maps here though. The site map you should build is one for Google. When you build a site map for Google and then submit it to Google, you are giving Google a list of all your pages in your site.

Google has guidelines for building and submitting your site which you can find here:
Managing my Google Sitemaps files
It is super easy to do this.

To make things even easier, I have located a nice free site map builder for you. You can download it to your desktop and make site maps until you are blue in the face.

Site Map Builder

This is a free tool and as usual, free tools don't come with support. The good news is it is very easy to figure out how to use it and it does have a help file included.

Once you have your site map created, you will have to save it to your site in a file called sitemap.xml

No other file name will work.

If you are creating site maps for your sub domains, list them as http://subname.domainname.com not http://www.domainname.com/subname. The reason for this is if you list them with the subname at the end, Google will treat it as a directory rather than a subdomain and you will be restricted as to how much information you will be able to see about your site at Google.

When you are creating your site map in the cool new tool (above) make sure you list the URL as http://subname.domainname.com to start out with. If you don't, your site map will be created wrong and you will either have to do  lot of work to fix it or make a new one. You will understand this more after your get started.

Google will not accept your URLs to be in two different forms. If you try submit your site map with all the URL as http://subname.domainname.com make sure your sitemap URL is http://subname.domainname.com/sitemap.xml.

You can submit as many site maps as you wish to Google. I suggest you submit one for each site. If they are subdomains, then one for each subdomain. The more information you offer to Google, the better off you will be.

OK, it sounds more confusing than it is. You will probably have to do a little reading at Google to get you started but once you get going, it will all come clear to you.

Will this help get you indexed faster?

That all depends on who you talk to. Some say yes and some say no. I say, considering you can create and submit a site map in about 15 minutes, it certainly can't hurt.

Google Says: By submitting a Sitemap to a search engine, you will help that engine's crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

What about Yahoo?

Yahoo does not use a sitemap like Google does. Instead, Yahoo uses what is called a url list.

This is even easier than the sitemap. Open a text document on your desktop. Name it urllist.txt. Add a list of all the pages on your site that you want indexed. One URL per line, no additional characters. Upload this to your website and you are done. Yahoo will find it when they spider your site and all your pages will get indexed.

Time to get to work...

Download Site Map Builder, read Google Rules, start building!

Build A Site Map