Sitemap? What is it? How to Add it to Our Website?

Lanna — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 02:22:41 +0000

Why do we need to add a sitemap to our website? The answer is that it will help Googlebot to crawl your website more efficiently. Instead of just crawling your main page it will crawl more deeply about other pages of your website as well. Thus it increases the visibility of your website showing up on Google search engine. This means that more people will find your website. If you are running a business website, then you are more likely to get more visitors. Thus you will increase your sales.

Here I want to show you how to add a sitemap to your website using Google Webmaster Tool’s account. If you have a website self-hosted by a web server, then it is easy. Just create a sitemap using Google Sitemap Generator here. Then save it as sitemap.xml file. You can name it whatever name you want. After you’ve done that, upload it to your web server in the root directory using FTP, and finally submit it in Google Webmaster Tools‘ account like this http://www.yourdomainname.com/sitemap.xml. Make sure you change yourdomainname to be your own domain name. It did not give me any problem when I submitted mine.

However it took me pretty long time to figure out how to add a sitemap to my blog which is hosted by Google Blogger and my other blog which is a self-hosted WordPress blog. The self-hosted WordPress blog is in my website’s sub-directory. It gave me hard time when I tried to submit a sitemap through Google Webmaster Tool’s account. In order to make it work I found out from this feed validator web tool that I have to submit it like this http://www.yourdomainname.com/blog/?feed=atom for atom or http://www.yourdomainname.com/blog/feed for RSS. Make sure you change yourdomainname to be your own domain name.

The blog with Google Blogger also gave me hard time. I searched Google Webmaster Help Group and I was guided to add atom.xml to the end of my Blogger’s URL, but I just kept getting errors. At the end I found one error saying, “Paths don’t match. We’ve detected that you submitted your Sitemap using a URL path that includes the www prefix (for instance, http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml). However, the URLs listed inside your Sitemap don’t use the www prefix (for instance, http://example.com/myfile.htm).” So I just submitted it like this http://yourdomainname.blogspot.com/atom.xml without www and it works! Make sure you change yourdomainname to be your own domain name. Now all of my sitemaps in my three websites work fine!

If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comment section. Good luck to all of you!

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Sitemap? What is it? How to Add it to Our Website?