Helping Google search and index your website can only help you when it comes to website design.  The “Googlebot” is advanced enough to be able to crawl your website without adding a site-map, but we recommend creating a site-map because it can help direct the search engine through your website.  The advantage to this is that Google will be able to quickly index all newly updated pages in your site.

The best free tool to create a site-map is XML-Sitemaps, because the site lets you create a free site-map to upload to your server up to 500 indexed pages.  If your website has over 500 pages, the paid version of their software can handle more.

It’s easy to create a site-map and then upload it to your website.  Here are the steps:

1.  Head over to XML-Sitemaps to create a site-map and save it to your Desktop or a folder on your computer.

2.  Upload the file to the root folder of your website.

3.  Visit Google Webmaster Central and login with your Google account to the “Site status wizard” and head to the Webmaster tools.

4.  Using a META tag or HTML file, you must verify your website by adding the META tag to your site, or uploading a blank HTML file to your site per Google.

5.   Go to the Sitemaps area of Google Webmaster Tools, and add the URL of your site.  Then you’re done!

Posted on February 15th, 2007 by Firelead Affiliate Network
Filed under: Google, Tools