Search Engine Optimization

A Simple White Hat Technique To Get Indexed By Google

Everybody knows that getting indexed in Google is getting more
and more difficult each day and every body is looking for that
edge over the competition.
Most “white hat” SEO’s frown upon methods like cloaking,
blog and ping and other such “black hat” techniques and never had
any special technique that they could use to help get their pages
indexed better.
Well, presenting Google Sitemaps, Googles latest offering which
is still in the beta stage, and which won’t make the purists frown.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/stats
Google sitemaps is a service that allows webmasters to define how
often their sites’ content is going to change, which is supposed
to give Google a better idea of what pages to index.
By placing a specially formatted XML file on your web server, you
inform Google of whenever your pages change, and then the
googlebot crawls the updated pages making the necessary
updates to its database.
Google has provided the format your xml file has to be in at
https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html
An interesting point is that the xml file has 2 tags, changefreq
and priority with which you can also indicate how important each page is, and how frequently the page changes.
The valid values for changefreq are “always”, “hourly”, “daily”,
“weekly”, “monthly”, “yearly” and “never” and similarly the
priority can vary from 0.0 to 1.0, where 0.0 identifies the
lowest priority page(s) on your site and 1.0 identifies the
highest priority page(s) on your site.
Once you have the xml file in place on your server, you need to
inform Google about it by opening this URL in your browser
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=URL
where the URL part in the above URL should be the URL-encoded
location of your Sitemaps xml file.
Now Google has provided an open source script that will
automatically generate the xml file for you. The only drawback
being its in a scripting language called Python.
There are however several Free Third Party scripts and tools
available.
1)Softplus GSiteCrawler: This is a windows software and is
extremely easy to use.It has been coded in Visual Basic 6.0.
http://johannesmueller.com/gs/
2)SiteMaps Pal: This is a online service that generates the
sitemap for you.It has a limit of 1000 links. So if you web site
has more than 1000 links, this won’t work for you.
http://www.sitemapspal.com/
3)Google Sitemap Generator: This is another free online sitemap
creator.This service lets you crawl sites 3 levels deep and
limits the number of links to 400.
http://www.my-google-sitemap.com/
4)phpSitemapNG from enarion: This is a php script that you need
to upload to the root of your web site and the script generates
the sitemap file on the server.
It also lets you submit the sitemap to Google by clicking a link.
The drawback of this script is that you will need to upload it to
each of your sites and it also doesn’t recognize subdomains.
http://enarion.net/google/
5)Google Sitemap Generator for Dreamweaver: This dreamweaver
extension by George Petrov lets you quickly create Google
Sitemaps for your dreamweaver sites.
http://www.dmxzone.com/ShowDetail.asp?NewsId=10538
6)Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress: Here is a plugin for
wordpress users
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-
v2-final
7)SecretSpider generator: This is a paid software priced at $97.
Its advantages are that it also lets you gzip the xml file
thereby making it smaller in size.
Secret Spider generator
So, go ahead and make your website more Google-friendly.
About The Author
Satyajeet Hattangadi is the Owner of Novasoft Inc
http://www.novasoft-inc.com/products.asp, creators of
Adsense Cloaker http://www.adsensecloaker.com,
a unique php script that hides your adsense ads
from the robots and helps prevent de-indexing by yahoo.
This article may be reprinted provided the resource box is kept
intact, with the active links included.