Tuesday, June 10, 2008

How to add your blog to Google Sitemap

Google Sitemaps is a tool that lets you notify Google every time you update your blog so that they return to index it. Will Google sitemaps help increase your ranking? The answer is yes!

How do you add your blog to Google Sitemaps?


First, you'll need a Google account. Once you have a Google account login to "Google Webmaster Tools."
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login?hl=us&utm_campaign=sitemaps-us-pbtls&utm_source=EM

In the "Add Site box," enter the URL to your blog, and hit ok.

You will then be asked to verify your site. You should receive a message that says, "Your site has been added to your account. Verify your ownership to view detailed statistics and errors for it."

Follow the next steps and verify your site.

Google offers two methods of verification. You might want to choose the Meta tag option.

You will then be given a META Tag. Copy the META tag listed and paste it in the section of your blog, before the first section.

Once you've added the Meta tag to your template, click on the verify button. If you have placed it in the wrong section the system will tell you.

Once you've verified your blog, it will take you to summary. Part of the display will include:

Potential indexing problems:

Some of your pages are partially indexed. [?]

We do not know about all the pages of your site. Submit a Sitemap to tell us more about your site.

Select the link “Submit a Sitemap.”

This will take you to Add Sitemap.

You can create a sitemap at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

The only drawback to using xml-sitemaps.com is that you will need to update your sitemap if you add a lot of pages to your blog, therefore you might want to submit your site feed url.

In the "Choose type pull down list", select "Add General Web Sitemap."

You'll then see a box that says, " My Sitemap URL is:"

Into the box for Sitemap URL, paste your Site Feed URL or the location of where you've uploaded the sitemap that you created and click "Add Web Sitemap."

Tip: If your blog is hosted on your own domain then upload the map to the "public_html/" folder of your site.

That's it, you're done. Now every time you add new content to your blog simply take the following URL and add your sitemap URL to the end of it: Ex: www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap= http://sitemap_url

You’ll need to encode the url to the path of your sitemap when pinging Google. This URL Encoder tool http://www.automapit.com/urlencoder.html will help you convert your URL to the proper format.

To see if Google has cached your blog, simply type cache: http://yourblogaddress into Google search.

No comments:

Post a Comment