Creating a Google Sitemap

The Google Sitemaps service simply allows Google to learn your website structure, and improve the way they crawl your site. The sitemaps you generate will contain the last modified dates, priority, and frequency. This tells Google what pages need to be re-crawled and how often to re-crawl them.

It is a very simple process: You create a sitemap according to one of their protocols, upload it to your website, login to your Google Sitemaps account, and input the URL to your Sitemap. Google then does the rest and downloads your sitemap to use in its crawler.

Ready to get started? Ok - First you will need to download a program that will crawl your website, and create a sitemap. There are a variety of ways you can do it, but the best program I found is SOFTplus GSiteCrawler. Simply download the program, install it, and run it.

Once the program is running, click the “Add new project” button. This nice and easy wizard will help you through the process. When it asks if you want it to upload the files via FTP, check it! You can do it manually, but this makes it very easy. You’ll want to also keep the GZ-files box checked - this makes your sitemap much smaller.

After you finish the project, the crawler should already be crawling (unless you de-checked the start crawl now box in the wizard). Once the crawler is finished, it should upload the files automatically - if not, simply upload them to your website (you can click the Generate button to create the files if they weren’t already created).

And last but not least, you’ll need to tell Google about your Sitemap. Simply goto Google Sitemaps and create an account. The rest of the process should be self explainatory.