How to bring your website on top using sitemaps

Google! one of the Internets most powerful (and developer friendly too) search engines has a free service that makes it easier for you to improve your websites coverage within Google's index through its collaborative crawling system. Although, Google does not 'Guarantee' immediate inclusion, But, is still good news for those of you who have just finished building a website and are ready to submit to the top search engines. So, what's this Google's service called?

It's called "Google Sitemaps".

The real cool thing about "Google Sitemaps" is it accepts RSS(Real Simple Syndication) and Atom feeds with the .XML extension as one of the accepted formats for submitting your websites Sitemap for inclusion in Googles index.

This is just one of the four formats Google accepts and is the one that I'm going to use for the rest of this article to show you how to generate your own .XML sitemap of your website for inclusion in Google.

Now the question is how to generate sitemap and where to submit it?

 

It's real easy to do so don't worry about it being to complicated. The whole process starting from sitemap generation to its submission is right here. So lets get started.

• 1. Sign up for "Google Sitemaps".

This step is easy, simply follow the link provide below and sign up for a Free account. It should only take you a few minutes to do, then once your done, come back here and go to Step 2.

Here's the link: https://www.google.com/webmasters/

• 2. Generate your .XML sitemap.

In this step your going to generate a .XML sitemap for your website using a Free online sitemap generator. This Free online generator will build you a sitemap up to 500 pages. If you have a larger website with thousands of webpages you'll have to use a paid service and/or software to generate yours.

Go to: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com

Enter your required information on the form provided.

• 3. Upload your generated .XML sitemap to your server.

Once your generated sitemap is finished(your generated .XML file should be called site.xml.gz) it's now time to upload it to your server using your FTP(File Transfer Protocol) program. This is very important that you do this before submitting it to Google Sitemaps for inclusion.

• 4. Submit your NEW .XML sitemap to "Google Sitemaps".

Now that you have generated your "Sitemap" for your website and uploaded it to your server all you have to do now is to go to "Google Sitemaps" and submit your sitemap URL.

(ex. http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.gz)

That's it. Pretty simple huh!!!

Now, depending on Google, your sitemap should get downloaded within the next 24 hours, so be sure to check and see that it did and that there wasn't any problems or errors.

Also, your going to want to be able to track your indexed webpages within the search engines, especially Google, so you can see how things are going, so I'll leave you with one last resource that will do this for you.

Go to google.com and search: site:yourdomain.com
The number of results will tell you total number of indexed pages.

Well, there you have it... "4 Quick and EASY Steps To Getting Your Website IN Through Googles 'Back Door'".