HTML tip: Create a site map

Manually create a site map to improve your Google ranking.

THE EASY WAY to create a site map is to add the URLs of a site into a text file. First, open a text editor that resides on your machine, eg, Notepad in Windows. Now start creating the site map by adding one URL per line, eg:

http://www.mysite.co.uk/index.html

http://www.mysite.co.uk/contact.html

Google allows up to 50,000 different URLs, and offers some guidelines that states users must fully specify URLs as Google attempts to crawl them exactly as provided. Others of note include: the text file must use UTF-8 encoding, only contain URLs and no header or footer information. The text file can be saved with any name a user desires, but for readability, save as ‘sitemap.txt’. The next step is to upload the text file to a web server and placed in the highest-level directory that search engines will crawl. If submitting a site map to Google or the first time, users will need to create a Google Webmasters account (www.google.com/ webmasters). When logged in, add the URL of the site in Dashboard and press Add Site. This will appear in the Dashboard, so next click Add under the Sitemap heading, choose a type, ie Add General Web Sitemap, and add in the name of the previously created site map file and press Add General Web Sitemap. Now it’s a matter of waiting for Google to process the submitted site map.