The tools can now be used and understood by most small business site owners.

Google explains everything and lists Sitemaps resources at:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

To use Google sitemaps, you must first sign up for a Google Account. If you already use Google Adwords, Analytics, Gmail or other Google provided tools, you can use your existing account to submit a Google sitemap for your site. Get an account at the following URL if you don’t already use Google services:

https://www.google.com/accounts/

NON-PROGRAMMER SMALL BUSINESS WEBMASTERS WANT SIMPLICITY

Many webmasters struggle to understand even the simplest HTML and meta tags and after visiting the Sitemaps program page when it was first announced in the summer of 2005, those small business site owners went away sadly shaking their heads and mumbling. They complained, “I can’t even add PERL scripts to my own CGI bin and properly set permissions on page files – how am I going to install and debug a Python script on my server, run cron jobs and generate XML files?”

Apparently Google heard all that grumbling and came back with the newly released “Webmaster Central” to answer the concerns of excess complexity. They no longer require you to be a geek to get all your pages into their index. They’ve created tools to make the job of submitting all of your pages for inclusion in their index very much easier to handle.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

The first listed “Site Status” tool lets you check indexing of your sites. If you enter an address into that search box and press the “Next” button, they’ll return a page with a button labeled “Take me to Google Sitemaps” and encouraging use of the sitemaps tools, regardless of whether you’ve already submitted that sitemap or not. They’ll list some minor details about the site entered such as:

Pages from your site are included in Google’s index. [?]

Some of these pages are indexed without a title or description. [?]

Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Aug 18, 2006

They list “Potential indexing problems” and then state:

More details about your site may be available

By using Google Sitemaps, you can learn more details available only to site owners, such as:

errors Googlebot encountered while crawling your site

top search queries that return your site

GOOGLE SITEMAPS DIFFERENT FROM HTML SITEMAPS

Let’s back up for a moment though. Webmasters have been told for ten years now to build a sitemap into their web site that lists all of their pages (if it is a small web site with under a hundred pages) or at least listing major sections of their site (if they have thousands or tens of thousands of pages.) So what is the difference here?

Google sitemaps are actually XML documents (not public html pages) that hold much more information about your web pages to help Google determine several things. They list the “priority” or importance, “last modified” dates, and “change frequency” of each page. But the creation of those documents had required webmasters to install that Python script on their server. Available at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=137793&package_id=153422

Or webmasters had to use third party software to generate the required XML file. Google recommends a brief list of sources for third party software to help them programmatically create the XML sitemaps:

http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

I’ve personally tried several of those third party tools and found two of the web-based sitemap generators lacking, one of the downloaded software tools crashed my computer (and created havoc for me), so what is a small business owner without programming skills to do?

Those business owners who are non-programmer types and want to use Google Sitemaps complained that Google was favoring geeks over business owners. They wanted a simple way to submit all of their pages to Google without running cron jobs on their server and debugging Python scripts.

PLAIN TEXT SITEMAPS FILES NOW ACCEPTED

Google heard our grumbling and now allows simple lists of URL’s in a plain text document. All you have to do is create that list of page files, save it as sitemap.txt and upload it to your server. Then you log in to your Google Webmaster Central (AKA Sitemaps) account and tell them the URL of your sitemap text document.

Before you submit your first sitemap URL on a domain, Google requires you to put a “site verification” meta tag on your site home page and click a “Verify” button to prove you own the site. Anyone with a Google account and access to your server can do this. You can add or remove any authorization tags placed by anyone with access to your server who is no longer authorized to see this data.

WEBMASTER CENTRAL TOOLS FOR SITE OWNERS

In the “Diagnostic” tab, there is a tool that will validate your robots.txt file, tells you which pages are restricted by that file and lists problem URL’s and reasons for the problems. It also lets you make changes in a copy of your robots.txt file locally, which shows immediately how changes would affect the next crawl by all Google bots, including the Adsense and PPC landing page quality crawlers! They warn on that page that local changes don’t affect your own robots.txt file and remind you to make the changes to the file on your server.

Another useful “Diagnostic” tool lets you set your preference for canonical URL’s to include www or non-www versions of your site. (This last item shows how seriously the Google team takes this canonical issue.)

What other tools are provided in Webmaster Central?

Under the “Statistics” tab in Webmaster Central is are “Query stats, Crawl stats, Page analysis” links with more data on your pages. The Query statistics show your top 20 search queries that searchers have used to find your web site and your top 20 click through queries. Those data tables provide some interesting and sometimes unexpected detail about how visitors find your site and allow you to further optimize and funnel those visitors. The “Crawl Stats” promises to show PageRank and distribution of PageRank throughout your site and in comparison to other sites.

The “Sitemaps” tab simply lists your submitted sitemaps for all your sites and shows the dates “Submitted, Last Downloaded, and Sitemap Status.” The status tells you if there are errors, and what they were (not allowed, external site links, 404 error page not found, etc.) I’ve just submitted a new sitemap on a just reserved, created and newly posted site this week and will report back on how long it took for index inclusion on that site to record the effect of early sitemap submissions.

LIFTING YOUR SKIRT FOR GOOGLE

Finally, there is a “Tools” link in the upper right corner of the “Sitemaps” page which allows you to “Download Data for all sites”, “Report Spam in Our Index” and a “Reinclusion Request” link to use if you’ve been banned for questionable techniques. Clearly, since you are doing all of this from within a Google account, you are openly providing Google with your information and making all spam reporting and reinclusion requests under your name from within a Google account. This suggests that you trust Google with all information they hold on your sites and any complaint made about search engine spam.

Currently there are ratings tools from within the Webmaster Central site to let you tell Google if you like the tools with a smily face, a neutral face and a frowny face. This may not last as the program comes out of beta, but lets you tell them what is useful and what isn’t.

Still need some help? Try joining, reading, searching and posting to Sitemaps and Webmaster Central Google Groups. Posts from webmasters get back responses from knowledgeable members. Watch for the little green “G” logo for Sitemaps team members for particularly definitive and useful recommendations.

http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help

http://groups.google.com/group/google-sitemaps

Want ongoing official Google blog posts about Webmaster Central?

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/

If you’ve had trouble getting all your pages indexed and want to use those informative and useful webmaster tools and reports – give Webmaster Central a try.

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Mike Banks Valentine operates SEOptimism, Offering SEO training of
in-house content managers http://seoptimism.com/SEO_Staff_Training.htm
as well as the Small Business Ecommerce Tutorial at
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where this article appears with live links to SMO stories, buttons, blog posts and examples.

Google Sitemaps technical writer Vanessa Fox has returned to the Sitemaps blog with a new post. This time, Fox tackles the issue of text snippets, those little entries that accompany a site’s listing in Google search. The organic listings frequently come from the Open Directory Project (ODP).

Not everyone wants the snippets provided by an ODP editor to be the ones that appear with their websites. Fox has reported that Google now supports this:

To specifically limit Google’s crawler, Googlebot, from using the ODP information, use the same tag but change ROBOTS to GOOGLEBOT.

After making the meta tag changes, it may take a while for the snippet changes to begin showing in Google search results. Naturally, using Google Sitemaps helps make the Google crawl process more effective for one’s site.

We’ve reviewed it before, and roughly every couple of months Google makes an update or adds a new feature to the service. It’s free to use, and accessible with a Google account.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Google Gives A Few Webmaster Pointers

The most notable of the Sitemaps updates are the new robots.txt analysis tool, a “snapshot of the status of your site in the index” that notifies of webmaster guidelines violations and includes a simplified re-inclusion request form. Google also added a comprehensive webmaster help center.

David Utter reported also on the Sitemaps update at SearchNewz, detailing a few other features:

Also, the Google Analytics Team asks, “what’s the average value of a visit from a certain website worth to you?” Team member Alden DeSoto briefly discusses how to measure the average visit to a website by comparing AdWords clicks to browser-typed direct URL traffic.

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In fact, the Sitemaps program provides a little peek inside Google’s mind – and it can tell you a lot about what Google thinks of your website!

Why Should You Use Google Sitemaps?

Until Google Sitemaps was released in the summer of 2005, optimizing a site for Google was a guessing game at best. A website’s page might be deleted from the index, and the Webmaster had no idea why. Alternatively, a site’s content could be scanned, but because of the peculiarities of the algorithm, the only pages that would rank well might be the “About Us” page, or the company’s press releases.

As webmasters we were at the whim of Googlebot, the seemingly arbitrary algorithmic kingmaker that could make or break a website overnight through shifts in search engine positioning. There was no way to communicate with Google about a website – either to understand what was wrong with it, or to tell Google when something had been updated.

That all changed about a year ago when Google released Sitemaps, but the program really became useful in February of 2006 when Google updated it with a couple new tools.

So, what exactly is the Google Sitemaps program, and how can you use it to improve the position of your website? Well, there are essentially two reasons to use Google Sitemaps:

1. Sitemaps provide you with a way to tell Google valuable information about your website

2. You can use Sitemaps to learn what Google thinks about your website

What You Can Tell Google About Your Site

Believe it or not, Google is concerned about making sure webmasters have a way of communicating information that is important about their sites. Although Googlebot does a pretty decent job of finding and cataloging web pages, it has very little ability to rate the relative importance of one page versus another. After all, many important pages on the Internet are not properly “optimized”, and many of the people who couldn’t care less about spending their time on linking campaigns create some of the best content.

Therefore, Google gives you the ability to tell them on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 how important a given page is relative to all the others. Using this system, you might tell Google that your home page is a 1.0, each of your product sections is a 0.8, and each of your individual product pages is a 0.5. Pages like your company’s address and contact information might only rate a 0.2.

You can also tell Google how often your pages are updated and the date that each page was last modified. For example your home page might be updated every day, while a particular product page might only be updated on an annual basis.

What Google Can Tell You About Your Site

Having the ability to tell Google all this information is important, but you don’t even need to create a sitemap file in order to enjoy some of the perks of having a Google Sitemaps account.

That\s because even without a Sitemap file, you can still learn about any errors that Googlebot has found on your website. As you probably know, your site doesn\t have to be “broken” for a robot to have trouble crawling it\s pages. Google Sitemaps will tell you about pages it was unable to crawl and links it was unable to follow. Therefore, you can see where these problems are and fix them before your pages get deleted from the index.

You can also get information on the types of searches people are using to find your website. Of course, most website analytics tools will give this information to you anyway, but if the tool you use doesn’t have this feature, then it’s always nice to get it for free from Google.

But the best part of the Sitemaps program is the Page analysis section that was added in February of 2006. This page gives you two lists of words. The first list contains the words that Googlebot associates with your website based on content on your site. The second list contains words that Googlebot has found linking to your site!

Unfortunately, Google limits the number of words in each list to 20. As a consequence, the inbound links column is partly wasted by words such as “http”, “www”, and “com” – terms that apply equally to all websites (hey Google, how about suppressing those terms from the report?). That said, this list does provide you with a way to judge the effectiveness of your offsite optimization efforts.

When you compare these two lists, you can get an understanding of what Google thinks your website is about. If the words on your Site Content column are not really what you want Googlebot to think about your site, then you know you need to tweak your website’s copy to make it more focused on your core competency.

If, on the other hand your inbound links don’t contain any keywords that you want to rank well for, then perhaps you should focus your efforts in that direction.

Above all else, you really want these two lists to agree. You want your inbound linked words to match up to the site content words. This means that Google has a clear understanding of the focus of your website.

Additional Benefits of the Sitemaps Program

Google has even started notifying Sitemaps-participating Webmasters if they are breaking any of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This can be very valuable information if your site suddenly becomes de-listed on Google and you don’t know why.

Only Sitemaps participants can get this information, and it is only provided at Google’s discretion. In fact, Google will NOT notify you if you are creating worthless websites that offer no original content, or if you are creating thousands of doorway pages that are redirecting to other web sites. Google doesn’t want to give the sp@ammers any clues as to how to improve their techniques.

How Do You Get Started with Google Site Maps?

The first thing you must do is obtain a Google Account. If you already have a Gmail, Adsense, or Adwords account, then you are all set. If not, you can register an account by visiting the Google Accounts page.

Building your sitemap file is pretty easy to do if you are familiar with XML, and if you aren’t you can always use a third-party tool such as the ones that are listed on Google’s website (http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html). Google also has a “Sitemap Generator” that you can download and install on your server, but unless you are fairly adept at managing Python scripts, you should probably stick to the third-party tools.

At any rate, once you have your Google Account and your Sitemap file built, the rest is very easy. All you have to do is:

1. Log into your account

2. Type your website’s URL into the “Add Site” box and click on “OK”

3. Click on the Manage Sites link for the website you are adding, and add your sitemap file to your account.

Google Sitemaps – An Excellent SEO Tool

Google Sitemaps help Googlebot quickly find new content on your website. They allow you to tell Google what’s important, what’s new, and what changes often. The tools provided to webmasters through the program can play a vital role in helping you understand how the search engines (especially Google) view your website.

Using this information you can dramatically improve the position of your website and quickly clear up any issues Google finds. You can also use the tools provided by Google to gauge the effectiveness of your off-site optimization efforts so you can better focus your time and energy on activities that bring you the most success.

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Matthew Coers is an Internet marketing expert. His website, ProfitChoice.com contains online courses designed to teach entrepreneurs how to build a website and make money online. Download his FREE Internet Marketing report, 7 Days to Website Success.

“How do I get into Google?” It’s a common refrain found on websites, forums, blogs, and inboxes of tech writers. Google is the Saint Bernard in a pen full of adorable search advertising pugs, and everyone wants a sip of the Googlejuice in the cask the big dog carries.

To make it easier for site publishers to drink deeply of the traffic Google can deliver, the company launched Sitemaps in June 2005. Yesterday, Vanessa took us through the Sitemaps ecology to explain how it can benefit webmasters everywhere.

After signing in to the service and placing a file Google can verify on one’s website, Sitemaps begins collecting information about that site. Webmasters can select from several options under the Site Overview’s Stats tab for a sitemapped URL.

Query stats shown in Sitemaps list the top search queries and top search query clicks for a rolling three-week period. Those lists display the average top position for each of the 20 queries presented in each list.

Sitemaps also shows top search queries from mobile devices, and queries made via the mobile web. Any of the lists under query stats may be downloaded as a .csv file for easy import into Microsoft Excel, OpenOffice Calc, or other programs for analysis.

That .csv download represents one of the many features Vanessa said the Sitemaps team enhances or adds on about a monthly basis. They plan to continue doing so, but Vanessa declined to discuss forthcoming features.

Crawl stats add a level of transparency to the Google crawling process. They also show the PageRank distribution of all the pages the Googlebot has crawled within a site, and not just the home page.

A Status section of crawl stats displays a bar graph of successfully crawled pages, and those where Googlebot had problems with HTTP errors, URLs that times out or were not followed, or URLs restricted by robots.txt.

Sitemaps lists all of these errors by status under an Errors tab in the Site Overview.

The Page analysis area of the stats shows how the Googlebot sees one’s website. It lists the types of pages and encodings Googlebot finds.

Of more interest will be the Common Words section of page analysis. This lists the anchor text Googlebot found most commonly in a site’s content, and in external links to a site.

An Index stats section provides six typical advanced searches site publishers perform for their URLs. The much-loved backlink search query that begins with link: can be found here.

The Sitemaps approach to testing robots.txt allows the Webmaster to see if an existing robots.txt file excludes what it is supposed to restrict, or if it is restricting something the webmaster wants crawled.

The test always checks for Googlebot access issues automatically. Webmasters can also choose to task additional Googlebots to see if mobile, image, or AdSense content for media partners will be accessed correctly by those crawlers.

To best promote Sitemaps, Google made the protocol and the Sitemaps Generator available as open source projects. Several other versions of the Generator have been created as a result. As long as they follow the Sitemaps protocol, those maps will work for the website.

The Sitemaps approach, where the Webmaster places the XML file created with a Generator in the site’s directory where Googlebot can find it, can speed up the process where Google finds one’s web pages.

Google also permits the use of attributes with the Sitemap that tell the Googlebot how frequently to check particular pages for updates. Vanessa noted how this helps with sites that deliver a lot of dynamic content that normally may not be indexed correctly.

Webmasters do not have to create a XML file for Sitemaps; they may submit a list of URLs as a text file or a RSS feed for indexing. That’s one of the enhancements the Sitemaps team delivered since the product’s release.

Vanessa closed by citing the various support options available for Sitemaps. In addition to the product blog where she posts about Sitemaps issues, the service has a Google Group dedicated to it.

Several third-party solutions, like programs and websites, exist to support Google Sitemaps. They offer code snippets in a variety of programming languages and plugins that work with CMS and other application platforms.

It is important for a website today to be indexed promptly and accurately by Google. Precious few shortcuts exist that offer a legitimate approach to doing this. Google Sitemaps does offer one that any Webmaster can use right now.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.