Marketing Defined

Google Sitemap PlugIns and Tools

Free Tools and PlugIns To Create and Submit Google SiteMaps

Following the recent announcement of the new Google SiteMap Generator Program, this informative collection of free tools and resources will help you easily create a SiteMap for submission to Google and is indispensable for quick inclusion of your blog in Google.

Getting indexed in Google is getting more and more difficult each day.

Most “white hat” SEMs 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 at this moment in the beta stage, and which won’t make the purists frown.

Google Sitemaps Statistics

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, thus inviting an immediate googlebot crawl of the updated pages. The Result: Google almost instantly makes the necessary updates to its database.

Google has provided an explanation of the format your xml file has to be in at Google explains sitemaps for Webmasters

An interesting point is that the .xml file has 2 tags:

• (1) “changefreq” for which the valid values are “always”, “hourly”, “daily”, “weekly”, “monthly”, “yearly” and “never”
• (2) “priority” values range from 0.0 to 1.0, with 0.0 identifying the lowest priority page(s) on your site and 1.0 showing the highest priority pages

In a nutshell the “changefreq” and “priority” tags respectively, indicate how important each page is, and how frequently the page changes/

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 Sitemap’s xml file.   For example, the URL to the Marketing Defined Blog’s “xml site map” that I would include after the “=” sign is:

http://marketingdefined.com/blog/sitemap.xml

Where do your place the link to your xml sitemap? It is also best practice SEO to include a link to your website’s “XML site map” at the very bottom of your Home Page. The “footer” navigation bar is recommended for a Blog, or alternatively it should be placed directly under your copyright notice at the very end.

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 which would make most people go “Python who?”

Following is a comprehensive list of several Free Third Party scripts and tools available to easily create the required xml language

1)Softplus GSiteCrawler:

This is windows software and is extremely easy to use. It has been coded in Visual Basic 6.0.
JohannesMueller GSite Crawler

2)SiteMaps Pal:

An 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.
SiteMaps Pal

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.
My Google Sitemap

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.
Enarion Google Sitemap

5)Google Sitemap Generator for Dreamweaver:

This Dreamweaver extension by George Petrov lets you quickly create Google Sitemaps for your Dreamweaver sites.
DMzone

6)Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress:

Here is a plugin for wordpress users
Arnebrachhold.de Google-sitemaps-generator rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank” which is the option I use with great success on all my blogs.

So, go ahead and make your website more Google-friendly.

CREDIT: The compilation of the above free Google Sitemap submission resources, plugins and tools, were received, with gracious thanks from a gifted software Programmer, Satya Hattangadi [CEO of Novasoft] Novasoft .  Satya has created a myriad of profit-pulling software programs which you check out sometime.

Many webmasters have reported an encouraging and almost instant leap in the percentage of web pages indexed by Google after submitting their website’s Site Map to Google in the required XML language. So please include the task of compiling and submitting an XML sitemap to Google on your list of things to do… today.