SEO: Create Advanced Sitemaps with A1 Sitemap Generator

Knowtebook — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 09:02:14 +0000

A1 Sitemap Generator is a very powerful tool by Thomas Schulz even for those like us who have an automatically wordpress generated sitemap and need an advanced tool. Unlike other plugins this generator can index up to hundred thousands of pages in a few minutes and submit them to Yahoo, Google, Ask.com, Bing and will ping other major web services.

Most of all you can create sitemaps like

XML sitemaps protocol: Ping Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN with XML sitemaps / Google sitemaps.
Google mobile sitemap: Google XML sitemap for mobile phones content.
Google news sitemap: Google XML sitemap for news content.
Google video sitemap: Google XML sitemap for videos. (Only for videos hosted on own website.)
Google code sitemap: Google XML sitemap for source code files.
Google image sitemap: Google XML sitemap for images and graphics.
Google base feed: Google Base extends RSS feeds. (Only common tags are supported.)
RSS sitemap feed: RSS feed files use XML and often used for blog and forum websites.
ROR sitemap feed: ROR sitemaps extends RSS feeds with more information.
ASP.net web sitemap: ASP.Net website navigation and menu controls use Web.sitemap files.
Text sitemap: Sitemap URL list format used by some search engines, e.g. Google and Yahoo.
HTML sitemap: Many websites use HTML sitemaps as a navigation aid to visitors.
HTML menu: HTML sitemap templates can also create URL lists for Javascript and CSS menus.

Advanced Features

Filter: You can use different filters for crawling and another set of filters for output/sitemap
Priority: Can calculate priorities based on internal linking much the same way Google calculates PageRank
Big Websites: With a little configuration tinkering, you should have no problems reaching half million+ URLs.
Scheduling: Includes rich command line interface making it possible to schedule etc. your scans, upload, pings etc
Protected area: Can perform website login of *most* sites (personally I think this is only of limited value, but some like it for HTML sitemaps.)
Sitemaps: Can create image, video (you have to host them on own domain), news, code, mobile you name it sitemaps etc.
Flash: There’s also some support for Flash if you want to configure A1SG for it.

I reallly don’t want to start boring you, but I really could continue the list like forever

SEO: How To Create a Google Sitemap in 5 Minutes

Knowtebook — Sat, 24 May 2008 19:39:20 +0000

Usually Google’s crawler Googlebot will find each and every page on your web site, as long as a link known by Google points to it. This way has its disadvantages, both for Google and webmasters as well. Google saves a whole of a lot of machine time and bandwidth costs, site owners get their new content earlier on Google’s SERPs and reduce their server load by Googlebot no longer spidering archived content too frequently.

What’s a sitemap?

Lets take a short view at the basics. If you know what sitemaps are, you can jump to the next part. By placing a formatted xml file with site map on your webserver, you enable Search Engine crawlers (like Google) to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.

Let’s do it!

So how do you create a sitemap? The best way is to use plugins for your blog or cms, which will get updated everytime you update you files and will inform google automatically. If you dont have a blog or cms you can do it by hand or you use this nice free sitemap builder.

Create a google sitemap

Go to the XML Sitemap builder
Enter the homepage path of your website (e.g. www.mydomain.com)
Enter the change frequency of your website (be honest
Leave the rest as it is and click on start to let the tool make your sitemap
When it is done download the compressed XML Sitemap version (.gz) and copy it to your root folder
You can open the file with an text-editor of your choise and change the priority of documents you think. You can use and value between 0.1 and 0.9, but be aware to only give really important sites the higher value.
The following is very important, so that all search engine bots will know you have a sitemap. Create a new file called
```
robots.txt
```
and add the following code to it:
```
User-agent: *
# Enter the path to your sitemap here
Sitemap: http://www.knowtebook.com/sitemap.xml.gz
```
Copy it in your root folder and upload it to your server with your new sitemap.
You are almost there! Go to Google Sitemap / Webmaster Tools and add your sitemap. If you do not have a webmaster account, just register and add your website. Now Google will scan your file and visit pretty soon all the pages you had in your index.
Finished! You might consider creating a new sitemap in a few weeks if your content has changed much. The result should somehow look like knowtebooks sitemap.

More great sitemap generator tools:

GSite Crawler for yahoo and google sitemaps
German sitemap creator where you can choose between the files you want in your sitemap
Generator by ScriptSocket
Generator which will ping google automatically if your changed a website (registration required)