Site Map Creation Tips

One thing that is very much over looked by many webmasters is a site map and I'm not talking about a html site map nearly every webmaster knows about html site maps. There are two more types of site maps that can help get you indexed and ranked faster than any other method besides getting links from PR8 sites and above.

So the first site map that seems to be the most widely used is the html site map this is just a page on your web site that you create with every link of your site listed. This is done so the search engines have central area where they can visit your site and find every page that you wish to have indexed.

This type of site map is also often used to submit to the search engines especially if you are submitting to MSN. View an example of a web page site map you should find a link from every web page linking to your site map.

Yahoo Site Map

Yahoo also has a site map that is not html or web page based it is created using a .txt file and will be found on a site under urllist.txt. You can submit this site map to yahoo in site explorer. All you need to do is open up your notepad program add all of your url's that you want to be indexed in yahoo and upload the file.

After that is complete Yahoo will ask you to confirm that you are the owner of the web site by getting you to upload a special html file or placing a code into your meta tags. This site map does not need to be placed as a link on your site as it is treated like an rss feed by Yahoo. Once verified you will see you pages start to appear after about seven days.

Google Site Map

The most effective way to get your site indexed is by using Google's sitemap which you can find under google webmaster tools. This is a true rss feed that is created and submitted as a .xml file so your site map is submitted to google in this format sitemap.xml. Again you will be asked to verify that you are the owner of the site by uploading a html page or placing a specific code into you meta tags.

There are many tools available today that can create a valid site map whether it is in html, .txt or xml, all you need to do is a search in any of the major search engines for these free site map services and you will be on your way to getting indexed by the big  three search engines.

To access the google webmaster tools and submit your site map you will need to create an account which only takes seconds to do, this is the same for Yahoo when submitting your site map.

Site Map Tools

Do I need any html editing skills? answer : No

So how and where can I create these site maps?

The best source that I have found is using a servive that not only creates your xml site map but every format that you need for the major serach engnes. All you have to do is type in your  domain name and the site map generator will crawl your site indexing every page that it finds. If you have a robots.txt file it will even exclude pages that have been specified there. And best of all this site map generator is free if you have a small to medium site.

The site is called XML sitemaps is very user friendly and has easy to follow instructions. Once your site maps have been created you just download them on to your pc and upload them to your hosting server.

Then visit the sites above to begin submitting your site map to  MSN, Yahoo Explorer and Google's Webmaster Tools this service couldn't make it any easy to submit your site map.