Sunday, July 5, 2009
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Friday, July 3, 2009
How to build a sitemap for blogger and large websites?
Today, let’s see more about sitemaps. Every webmaster must have a sitemap ready for his site and submit it to google in order to get all the pages listed on Google.Sitemaps are of two types, as you know the HTML sitemap you use to navigate a site and second the sitemap used to help crawlers crawl the pages more effectively.
Why are they necessary?
Sitemaps are not necessary.(Yep i said that) Even if you don’t have sitemaps the crawlers will crawl your pages and find the content. But, it is like letting them crawl in a dark room. What if you had a well lit room with all navigation and helpers around which will take them to each room? It will be more effective right? Sitemaps serve this purpose.
It has the site structure ready giving indication to the crawlers as to which are the folders/files that are important, which are not, which are the folders/files that are to be visited frequently, and which are the ones to be visited only once. This helps the crawlers to undersand your site more effectively.
Now, how to build a sitemap for blogger?
It’s very simple in Blogger. It only requires you to go to the Google Webmaster Central and ass your site feed and the sitemap is automatically created. You can get detail instruction on this here.Make sure that you submit your full feed and not partial one.
Which is the best sitemap generator program around?
There are lot of free online and downloadable sitemap generators.
Here’s a simplified listing of what is best.
1- Python Scipt – This is the most difficult one to install. But if you are familiar with python, then this is the best one around.It’s automated and requires no additional support.I don’t recommend it for a beginner.Requires technical knowledge.
2 – Online sitemaps - This is best for small websites. It’s easy, simple and online.Just go to this site and submit your url.Fill in some basic details like time and priority settings for the files and click go!The whole sitemap will be generated online.You will get both ROR file and the Google sitemap XML file.If you are interested only in Google, use the XML sitemap.The format is according to Google sitemap protocol and is faultless.
Best choice for beginners and small websites of less than 500 pages.
3 – Gsite Crawler - This is a downloadable application. If your website is a bit large and you have time to tweak some settings and is serious about sitemap, then i would recommend this guy for you.
It requires you to give the website url, then select the types of files to be scanned from it, priority settings are automatically detected, and you can create bot Google sitemap and Yahoo url.
It has report generation as well that will give you an idea of how many urls were crawled and broken links etc.This is very useful while handling large sites.
How to make sitemap for large sites?
If you have really large websites for instance a one million page one, then it’s really going to be tough creating a sitemap. Practically this is possible with the Python script but if you are not okay with the technical stuff then you got to depend on sitemap generator programs.(If you don’t have a really large website the follwing piece of information may not help you.)
Step 1 - Download a free sitemap generator program like Gsite crawler.
Step 2 - Use it to crawl each folder of your website as separate projects.Make sure that you create a new database each time a new project is opened.
Step 3 - Now you have separate sitemaps for each folder.
Ex:- yourdomain.com/folder1 has a sitemap called folder1.xml and yourdomain.com/folder2 has a sitemap called folder2.xml
Step 4 - Download this simple index generator program.
Step 5 - Copy paste all the folders (containing the sitemaps) from thh projects folder of Gsite crawler(C:program files…) and put it into one single folder.
Step 6 – Run the index generator program against this parent folder.
Step 7 – Now a sitemap index would be created with links to all the child sitemaps but one problem, since in Gsite Crawlers projects folder(C:Program Files) each crawled folder will be named with underscore replacing the forward slash.
Ex:- yourdomain.com/folder will be named as yourdomain.com_folder
Therefore the sitemap index produced will have the links too this way.
Step 8 - Use notepad/wordpad to open the sitemap index file. Find and replace all the underscores with forward slash.
Step 9 - Upload the child sitemaps in the respective folders online.
Ex: – yourdomain.com/folder1..folder2 etc.
Step 10 – Upload the sitemap index file to the root folder and submit it to google.
Bingo! There you go you have now created a sitemap index and child sitemaps for a large website. Now submit it trough the webmaster central window and keep waiting!
Create a sitemap to have your blog indexed by search engines
Create a sitemap to have your blog indexed by search engines
Sitemaps are a useful tool in helping get your blog pages indexed by search engines, which gives your blog extra "visibility" online and can drive more traffic to your site. Unfortunately, it can be quite difficult to hand code a sitemap file for a blog, especially if you have a lot of posts! Also, you would need to have your blog's sitemap hosted in the root directory of your hosting account, which makes it impossible for Blogspot bloggers to achieve. There are ways for for bloggers to solve this problem, and create sitemaps which can be indexed by Google and other search engines. Here are some suggestions: Blogger: The easiest way to upload your sitemap to google is to use the atom.xml file which is automatically generated for you. This will be located at: http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml if you have a Blog*spot hosted blog, or at http://www.yourdomain.com/atom.xml if you have a custom domain. I've also found this tool by Stephen Newton, which is a template you can use temporarily (don't publish, whatever you do!) create a sitemap which can be saved as an XML file if you have your own blog hosting (or some free hosting with your custom domain). Full details can be found over at Stephen's site. Moveable Type: Niall Kennedy has created this great template file which you can use to create an XML sitemap of your Moveable Type blog. Copy the code into a new index template and save as "sitemap" or something memorable. Once your sitemap template is saved, you can tell Google and other search engines where it is. TypePad:You can choose to publicise your sitemap in the settings. To add a sitemap to your weblog, go to Weblogs > Configure > Publicity and select Yes under Google Sitemap for your Publicity Preferences. More information can be found here. Wordpress: Arne Brachhold has created a great Wordpress plugin to generate a sitemap for Wordpress blogs, which you can find on this page. There's also a useful PHP file available for Wordpress users in the Social Patterns blog. General/Other blogs: Pingoat have also created a dynamic sitemap generator which uses your blog's address and can alter the priority of your posts to let search engines know which pages are most important. Once you've created and saved your XML file, you'll need to save this in the root of your web directory. Technorati Tags: seo | search+engine+optimisation | search+engine | sitemap | google | blogger | wordpress | typepad | sitemap+generator | xml
How to Make Your Blog or Website Google Friendly - Sitemap
How to Make Your Blog or Website Google Friendly - Sitemap
Watch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa8sOx7cRgw
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Some Tools For You
Search Engine Tools
- Backlink Checker
Bulk backlink checker for Google, Yahoo!, AltaVista and Alltheweb. - Alexa rank checker
Alexa rank checker with alexa graph. - Free PageRank Button
Display a free PageRank button on your Web site using our code.
Domain Tools
- Domain Availability Check
Domain name availability tool for major extention. - Whois Lookup
Whois search for all type domain extention.
HTML Tools
- Meta Tags Generator
Generate meta tags for your web pages, Major Search engine identify your website content by Meta Tags. - Email address encoder
Email address encoder tool, encode your email address to prevent spam. - HTML Encryption
HTML Code Encryptor, get you HTML code encrypted.
Other Tools
- Short URL
Tag and short your long URL! - md5 Encryption
md5 Encryption web tool. Use this tool to encrypt md5.
How to create .xml sitemap?
Google Sitemaps FAQ
I decided to make these frequently asked questions about sitemaps to help relieve the amount of same thread questions. Hopefully this can help answer any questions you have related to Google Sitemaps. You'll find this FAQ will be able to answer most of your questions related to sitemaps, if you don't you could always post your question in the Google Sitemaps sub-fourm on digitalpoint.
Q: What is a sitemap?
A: A sitemap is an XML file that lists all available URLs for a website, along with additional information about each URL in the file. You should always create a sitemap for your website. This will help search engines crawl your site faster and display more content. Right now the standard sitemap format is XML, all major search engine use this format for sitemaps.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: How do I create a XML Sitemap?
A: This is one task you will not want to do in notepad, it can be done, but would be very time consuming. There are many websites & freeware programs that can build an XML sitemap for you. I don’t recommend purchasing software to create XML sitemaps; many freeware programs do the exact same thing. Below is a few links to free XML sitemap generators & websites.
- http://www.vigos.com/products/gsitemap/ - Free XML Sitemap Program
- http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp - Online Sitemap Generator (no limits)
- https://www.google.com/webmasters/to...generator.html - Official Google Sitemap Generator
Q: How do I submit my XML sitemap to Google?
A: This is a very simple thing to do; I also recommend placing a direct link to your sitemap on your homepage. You can the Google Webmasters Central to submit your sitemap to Google. There are many other great features and tools with Google Webmasters Central as well; you’ll find it very useful. Below is a link to Google Webmasters Central.
- http://www.google.com/webmasters - Google Webmasters Central
Q: What is the robots.txt file?
A: The robots.txt file is part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol. You can use this file to allow or disallow search engines from crawling and indexing certain areas of your website. This is great to reduce bandwidth usage by crawlers. You can also point to your XML sitemap file; this is useful since it allows search engines to find your XML sitemap.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt - More Detailed Information
Q: How do I create a robots.txt file?
A: This is very simple to do. You can open notepad or any text editor you like and create the file robots.txt is text format only. Below is the basic sample code to point to your sitemap and allow indexing and crawling of all your pages. Just save this file and upload it to your top web directory.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
sitemap: Your URL to Your SiteMap
- http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html - More Advanced Robots.txt Usage.
Q: I’ve submitted my sitemap, why haven’t I been crawled?
A: Just because you submit a sitemap doesn’t mean you might get crawled any faster. New sites can take awhile to get fully indexed into Google, or any other search engine for that matter. The best way to increase this indexing is by getting quality back links to your site. Remember, the sitemap is just a map of your site for the search engines; it doesn’t increase your crawling rate. If it does, it isn’t by much.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Sitemap Resources
Below is a list of resources that may also help answer your questions, remember reading is knowledge, and the more knowledge you have the better your site will perform.
- https://www.google.com/webmasters/to.../protocol.html - Google Explanation of the XML Sitemap Protocol
- http://www.vigos.com/products/gsitemap/ - Free XML Sitemap Program
- http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp - Online Sitemap Generator (no limits)
- https://www.google.com/webmasters/to...generator.html - Official Google Sitemap Generator
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt - Robots.txt Detailed Information
- http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html - Advanced Robots.txt Usage.
Br ssandecki
Posts
