Create Your Own XML Google Sitemap

Google Sitemaps is a new program to help improve and increase the coverage of your website with Google. There are software and generator programs to help you make them, but its not that hard to create it yourself. If you have a very large website, then you will want to look for a program/generator.

The Sitemap must contain:

An opening <urlset> tag & end with a closing </urlset> tag.
Include a <url> entry for each URL as a parent XML tag.
Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

Optional additions are <lastmod>, <changefreq> and <priority>. In the example below, the optional additions have been included.

For priority, the default value given to all pages is 0.5, the range is from 0.0 to 1.0. This value is mainly to help the crawlers see what you determine more important on your site when they crawl it.

For ChangeFreq, the possible choices are always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly,  and never.

XML Sitemap Format

Below is a sample of the format that can be used for your XML sitemap. Simply highlight the grey shaded area, and paste it into notepad. From there you can replace the urls with your own, and customize it as needed.

When saving the file in note pad, make sure you save type as All Files, and call it sitemap.xml. Once that is done, you can go to Google Sitemaps and create an account and submit your new XML sitemap.

As you create new pages for your site, you will need to update it.

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> 

<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.8">

<url>

  <loc>http://www.ThisIsMySite.ca</loc> 

  <lastmod>2005-10-19</lastmod> 

  <changefreq>daily</changefreq> 

  <priority>0.8</priority> 

  </url>

<url>

  <loc>http://www.ThisIsMySite.ca/service.html</loc> 

  <lastmod>2005-10-19</lastmod> 

  <changefreq>daily</changefreq> 

  <priority>0.6</priority> 

  </url>

<url>

  <loc>http://www.ThisIsMySite.ca/news.html</loc> 

  <lastmod>2005-10-19</lastmod> 

  <changefreq>hourly</changefreq> 

  <priority>0.5</priority> 

  </url>

<url>

  <loc>http://www.ThisIsMySite.ca/aboutus.html</loc> 

  <lastmod>2005-10-19</lastmod> 

  <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> 

  <priority>0.5</priority> 

  </url>

<url>

  <loc>http://www.ThisIsMySite.ca/contact.us</loc> 

  <lastmod>2005-10-19</lastmod> 

  <changefreq>weekly</changefreq> 

  <priority>0.5</priority> 

  </url>

  </urlset>

If you are looking for a Google Sitemap Generator, you can go to http://www.sitemapbuilder.net/ , and it will tell you what is needed to be done to create your sitemap.
 

Gerard Manning
Search Engine Placement Specialist
Search Engine Marketing Agency :: Manning Search Marketing