Everybody knows that getting indexed in Google is getting moreand more difficult each day and every body is looking for thatedge over the competition.
Most "white hat" SEO's frown upon methods like cloaking,blog and ping and other such "black hat" techniques and never hadany special technique that they could use to help get their pagesindexed better.
Well, presenting Google Sitemaps, Googles latest offering whichis still in the beta stage, and which won't make the purists frown.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/statsGoogle sitemaps is a service that allows webmasters to define howoften their sites' content is going to change, which is supposedto give Google a better idea of what pages to index.
By placing a specially formatted XML file on your web server, youinform Google of whenever your pages change, and then thegooglebot crawls the updated pages making the necessaryupdates to its database.
Google has provided the format your xml file has to be in athttps://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html
An interesting point is that the xml file has 2 tags, changefreqand priority with which you can also indicate how important each page is, and how frequently the page changes.
The valid values for changefreq are "always", "hourly", "daily","weekly", "monthly", "yearly" and "never" and similarly thepriority can vary from 0.0 to 1.0, where 0.0 identifies thelowest priority page(s) on your site and 1.0 identifies thehighest priority page(s) on your site.
Once you have the xml file in place on your server, you need toinform Google about it by opening this URL in your browser
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=URLwhere the URL part in the above URL should be the URL-encodedlocation of your Sitemaps xml file.
Now Google has provided an open source script that willautomatically generate the xml file for you. The only drawbackbeing its in a scripting language called Python.
There are however several Free Third Party scripts and toolsavailable.
1)Softplus GSiteCrawler: This is a windows software and isextremely easy to use.It has been coded in Visual Basic 6.0.
http://johannesmueller.com/gs/2)SiteMaps Pal: This is a online service that generates thesitemap for you.It has a limit of 1000 links. So if you web sitehas more than 1000 links, this won't work for you.
http://www.sitemapspal.com/3)Google Sitemap Generator: This is another free online sitemapcreator.This service lets you crawl sites 3 levels deep andlimits the number of links to 400.
http://www.my-google-sitemap.com/4)phpSitemapNG from enarion: This is a php script that you needto upload to the root of your web site and the script generatesthe sitemap file on the server.
It also lets you submit the sitemap to Google by clicking a link.
The drawback of this script is that you will need to upload it toeach of your sites and it also doesn't recognize subdomains.
http://enarion.net/google/5)Google Sitemap Generator for Dreamweaver: This dreamweaverextension by George Petrov lets you quickly create GoogleSitemaps for your dreamweaver sites.
http://www.dmxzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=105386)Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress: Here is a plugin forwordpress users
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final7)SecretSpider generator: This is a paid software priced at $97.Its advantages are that it also lets you gzip the xml filethereby making it smaller in size.
Secret Spider generator
So, go ahead and make your website more Google-friendly.
About The Author
Satyajeet Hattangadi is the Owner of Novasoft Inc
http://www.novasoft-inc.com/products.asp, creators of Adsense Cloaker
http://www.adsensecloaker.com, a unique php script that hides your adsense ads from the robots and helps prevent de-indexing by yahoo.
This article may be reprinted provided the resource box is keptintact, with the active links included.
