Adding An XML Sitemap To Google Webmaster Tools

If you have read our other posts on registering your site with Google Webmaster Tools, you should both understand the importance of this to your website SEO, and also now have an account and your website should be verified. If you still need to undertake these steps, read these last two blog posts:

• What is Google Webmaster
• Adding Your Website To Google Webmaster

There is a huge amount of valuable information that you can get from Google Webmaster, but you need to know where it is, and what to do with it.

Firstly, you should submit an xml Sitemap. This is basically a list of all the URLs in your website. It helps to tell Google about all your pages; including pages which for some reason or another they may not be aware of. 

There are many reasons Google may not crawl every page on your site naturally, so this is why Sitemaps are helpful. Google states, that Sitemap’s are useful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

To create an xml Sitemap:

• Visit http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ add your site URL to the box (ignore the other boxes and options) and click on ‘Start’.
• You will then need to save this and upload the file to your website.
• Click on ‘Site Configuration’ and then ‘Sitemaps’
• Click on ‘Add a Sitemap’
• You will be presented with a box with your domain name with a field at the end of it – type in sitemap.xml and then click on submit.

And that’s it.  Google will tell you if there is a problem with your Sitemap, but if you have followed these instructions you should have submitted it successfully.

Our next post is the long overdue explanation of what information Google Webmaster Tools can give you and how to interpret the data to improve your website.

If you found this information useful, but feel like you don’t have time to manage your online marketing, please get in touch. We’re online marketing experts and love nothing more than getting stuck into websites, helping our customers get more business from their online endeavours! Email us today on info@SMEketing.com.

Leave a Comment May 25, 2010

What Is Google Webmaster Tools?

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service from Google that lets you gain information about your website and how Google sees it. It is an important part of any search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign.

It’s extremely easy to use and is a vital tool in ensuring your website is performing as well as it should be. It also informs you of any issues that Google has with your site – giving you the opportunity to fix them, ensuring your site stays in Google’s good books!

So what can Google Webmaster do?

• It lets you check and set the crawl rate
• It lists internal and external links
• It gives you statistics about how Google indexes your site
• It allows you to submit an xml sitemap
• You can generate and submit a robot.txt file
• You can set a preferred domain – telling Google what you would like your site to be listed as
• See what popular keywords are being used to access your site and where your pages rank for those terms
• See any errors Google has come across while crawling your site

We will be giving more information on what these mean and how you can interpret the results to help improve your site in a future blog post.

You can find Google Webmaster here: www.google.com/webmasters/tools.

You’ll firstly need to log into Google Webmaster with your Google account (if you don’t have a Google account you can easily create one here). You’ll then have to add your site to Google Webmaster and verify it – if you’re unsure how to do this, don’t worry…

…our next blog post will outline how to add and verify your site within Google Webmaster.

Leave a Comment May 11, 2010