What are Search Engine Sitemaps?

Search engine sitemaps are organized structures of websites' pages, usually useful to search engines for better content indexing.

Building Sitemaps

Not so long ago, search engine sitemaps were structurally different for every search engine out there. This was complicated, not to mention unpractical. Now, XML sitemaps are the standard everyone has to follow. The best thing to do when you require one of these is to use a generator that can successfully create them for you.

The Google Sitemap Generator is an open source online application that can help you build a sitemap from scratch. It's a Python script that creates valid search engine sitemaps for your sites using the Sitemap protocol. It can create one from simple URL listings, web server directories or even from your website's access logs.

Before you start, there are a few aspects you need to take care of. Your server needs to accept connections from you and you should be able to run scripts on it. It also has to run Python 2.2 or higher and you must know how to launch it. Another useful thing to know would be the directory path to your website (for example /var/www/vhosts/your- website.com/), and the complete path to your access logs if you are going to use them later. The last requirement would be you having access to upload files on your web server (via FTP for example).

Once everything is set up, a few steps are to be followed in order for a successful result. First of all you should download google-sitemap_gen from SourceForge and extract the files in the archive to disk.

You will need the following files

• README - the readme file
• sitemap_gen.py - the script that will generate the sitemap
• example_config.xml - the configuration template you're going to use
• example_urllist.txt - the URL template in case you want to create an URL-based sitemap

Google provides an example_config.xml file you can start from. Take a look at it and modify it to reflect your website then save it in that form.

Next, you should upload the above mentioned files to your web server in a place you can access via a command line. The uploading of ' urllist.txt' is optional if you're not using the text file method of generating the sitemap.

Afterwards, you should run the sitemap_gen.py script that will actually generate you search engine sitemaps. You can do this by connecting to the server via SSH if it's an UNIX based server you can execute the script by typing the following command into the upload directory: "python sitemap_gen.py --config= config.xml". Wait for your web server to finish up and if it finds any errors, correct them in your config.xml accordingly. If you don't get any errors, you should get a valid search engine sitemap under the name of sitemap.xml.gz (default).

Once this step is done, the resulting files will be a valid sitemaps you can use for search engine subscriptions, such as the Google Webmaster Tools.

Should you get stuck at any point, feel free to browse through Google's official documentation and tutorials on the subject at Using the Sitemap Generator.