Google Sitemaps Series Part 2 - Creating the Sitemap

June 13th, 2007 in Tutorials/Helps, Website Tools by Dan

In step one of this series I showed (or rather told) you where to go in order to sign up for a sitemaps account with Google. Today I want to help you create the sitemap that you’ll be submitting to Google. Google accepts several different file types for a sitemap, and today I’ll show you how to do a sitemap with either an XML file or a text file. Either way is fine, in my opinion it just depends on what you’re the most comfortable with.

Text File
Setting up a text file to be a Google sitemap is a very easy thing to do. All you have to do is open up Notepad (most if not all computers should have this program by default) and make a list of all of the pages of your website. Each unique URL should be on its own line, and you need to make sure that you include the entire URL for each page. Here’s an example of what a text file would look like:

http://www.website.com/index.html
http://www.website.com/about_us.html
http://www.website.com/contact_us.html
http://www.website.com/some_other_page.html

Get the idea? Then you just need to upload this to your hosting account in the root directory. If you upload it to something like http://www.website.com/files/sitemap.txt it will not work! It has to be uploaded to the same directory as your index file.

XML File
This is another really easy way to create your Google sitemap. All you have to do is create an XML file that you can upload to your site instead of a text file. An easy site to do this with is XML-Sitemaps.com. You can get a free XML sitemap with them, but if you have a really large website you may have to pay for it just based on the size. The same basic rule applies for uploading an XML file as it does for the text file, you have to upload it to the root directory! Once you’ve uploaded the sitemap to your host, you’re ready to go in and submit that sitemap to Google. I’ll show you how to do this next time!

Note: For those of you using a Website Dynamics builder (SiteCreatorPlus, CityMax, GoldPhoria, etc.) you can do this whole Google sitemap thing very easily. All you have to do is go to Manage Page > Power Tools > Add a Google Sitemap to Your Site. Then follow the instructions and you’ll be good to go!

This post is part of a 5 Part Series. Below are links to the other parts of the series:
Google Sitemaps Series Part 1 - Creating the Account
Google Sitemaps Series Part 3 - Adding Your Sitemap to Google
Google Sitemaps Series Part 4 - What You Can Learn From Google Sitemaps Data
Google Sitemaps Series Part 5 - Getting More Information

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7 Comments

ArthurJune 14th, 2007 at 3:27 am

If you have any problems to create XML sitemap files for your sites or to notify search engines about updated sitemap files, try Sitemap Writer Pro. It is a powerfull tool that helps you to create and keep up-to-date sitemaps for your websites.
Sitemap Writer Pro has new tools - FTP manager for uploading sitemaps, search engine notification tool (now supports for Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and MSN.com), site crawler for adding an URLs into the sitemap and Yahoo Index viewer.

[Reply]

DanJune 14th, 2007 at 5:56 am

Arthur,
thanks for the tip on another site to use for sitemaps. I hadn’t heard of this one before. I like that they have a rather low price point for their service.

[Reply]

Web Hosting Reviews, Web Site HostingSeptember 24th, 2007 at 1:32 am

Web Hosting Reviews, Web Site Hosting

I couldn’t understand some parts of this article, but it sounds interesting

DanSeptember 24th, 2007 at 5:38 am

Do you have any specific questions about it that I can answer for you?

[Reply]

Free WebtoolSeptember 18th, 2008 at 2:04 pm

Hello There,
We made this free webtool for creating googlesitemaps. You can download it for free, give us your opinion, Thanks.
http://googlesitemaps.ottimizzazione.biz

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