Need help creating sitemap
-
Hello,
The details of my question is sitemap related. Below is the background info:
we are ecommerce site with around 4000 pages, and 20000 images. we dont have a sitemap implemented on our site yet. i have checked alot of sitemap tools out there, like g-sitecrawler, xml sitemap, a1 sitemap builder etc, and i tried to create sitemaps via them, but all them give different results. the major links are all there, but the results start to vary for level 2, level 3 links and so on.
plus no matter how much i read up on sitemaps, the more i am getting confused. i read lots of seomoz articles on sitemaps, and due to my limited seo and technical knowledge, the extra information on these articles gets more confusing.
i also just read an article on seomoz that instead of having one sitemap, having multiple smaller sitemaps is very good idea, specially if we are adding lots of new products (which we are).
Now my question:
My question is having understood the immense value of sitemap (and by having it very poorly implemented before), how can i make sure that i get a very good sitemap (both xml and html sitemap). i do not want to do something again and just repeat old mistakes by having a poorly implemented sitemap for our site.
I am hoping that one of the professionals out there, can help me also make and implement the sitemap.
If you can please point me to the right direction.
-
I use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ as well its well worth the money. you want an accurate site map and you can always edit the text file if you are handy in xml.
-
I've been using xml-sitemaps software for years now, their paid software is great. If you are running PHP based server, you just add the files to one directory and follow the installation steps. It will not only index the entire content, but you can also set limits on how many links per sitemap, they offer addons that automatically creates images/video sitemaps, news, etc. The software also creates an HTML version of the sitemap. And the XML version uses CSS so you can read it with ease.
I would go with them, the software even gives you info on how to submit the sitemaps to Google, sitemap index, etc. Then you can also create a link in the robots.txt so spiders know where to crawl:
Something like:
User-agent: * Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
SEO direction - help needed
Hi, I've been working on a site for about 5 years. We built the traffic up to about 8k visitors/day. Although now it's dropped down over the past 2 years to about 2k visitors a day. New traffic source is mainly from SEO longtail. The whole time we have been working to improve the site. What's the best way to get some help from experts on the right direction to get traffic back up or to at least tell me the site will never work 🙂 Thanks in advance. M
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | relientmark0 -
Help Identifying Unnatural Links
http://bit.ly/XT8yYYHi,Any help with the below will be most appreciated.We received an unnatural links warning in Webmaster Tools and noticed a large drop in our rankings. We downloaded and carried out a full link audit (3639 links) and logged in an excel spreadsheet with the following status: OK, Have Contacted, Can't Contact, Not SureWe have had some success but the majority of the ones we identified are not contactable.We use the dis-avow tool to tell Google of these. We then submitted a reconsideration request where we explained to Google our efforts and that we can supply them with our audit if necessary by email as you can't upload any evidence.A few days later we received a response suggesting that we still have unnatural links. We are a little stuck as we don't know what they can be:1. Is Google actually looking at our dis-avowed links before making this judgement?2. We have missed something that Google is considering bad but we can't see in our audit?Again we need a little help as we are trying to sort this out but can't see what we are falling down on.I can provide our spreadsheet if necessary.Many ThanksLee
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LeeFella0 -
Title Tag Help
Hi everyone, So, I have some general question's about Title tags. My question's are as follows: 1. If i have a title tag like this 'Commercial bathroom instillation '. Will I show up for Commercial bathroom or Commercial bathroom instillation? The reason I ask is, i'm aiming for Commercial bathroom which has more search volume, but here is where the problem comes in. If I have Commercial bathroom instillation it is a more compelling title. Ideally i'm aiming for Commercial Bathroom, so im in a bit of a conundrum, as you can see. 2. My second question is if I have 'Bath Review and Shower review' for my title tag. Will I show up for Bath Review individually, and shower review individually, or only when someone search's that exact query? I hope that makes sense thanks. Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterRota0 -
Help! My Domain Authority keeps dropping! What do I do?
Hey! I just noticed my Domain Authority keeps dropping? What's happening? What do I do to get it better. I'm scared and dont know the next move to make to get this site better. Help please! Thanks! http://www.moondoggieinc.com Kristy O
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KristyO1 -
Rel=alternate to help localize sites
I am wondering about the efficiency of the rel=alternate tag and how well it works at specifically localizing content. Example: I have a website on a few ccTLD's but for some reason my .com shows up on Google.co.uk before my .co.uk version of my page. Some people have mentioned using rel=alternate but in my research this only seems to be applicable for duplicate content in another language. If I am wrong here can somebody please help me better understand this application of the rel=alternate tag. All my research leads me to rel=alternate hreflang= and I am not sure that is what I want. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DRSearchEngOpt
Chris Birkholm0 -
My site is duplicated on the internet, please help.
I've been told that my site: "- your site is duplicated on the internet. Both www.joeyvalyphotography.com and joeyvalyphotography.com are valid internet addresses. This is a problem for SEO." I am wondering, what's the cause of this, and how it can fixed. Thanks In advanced, Joey
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gaji0 -
Multiple sitemaps for one site?
Excuse my sitemap ignorance here. I've got a site and it's got a blog in a sub-folder. The blog gets updated frequently, the main site does not. Is it best to; a) Have 2 sitemaps.. one in the root and one in the /blog folder. b) Have 1 sitemap that is regularly updated The reason being, I know there's various plugins that create blog sitemaps on the fly, so that would be much easier than updating the main sitemap every time a change was made. If the answer is 2 sitemaps; Would you stop the root sitemap from detailing the contents of the blog folder or just update it every so often with the contents of the blog folder?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeterAlexLeigh0 -
Multiple Keyword Research Questions, Help
Hello , I've been trying for several days to understand how keyword research works for a multi purpose website,I've read guides, articles even some chapters from the book" The Art of Seo" by O'Reilly and still no luck. It seems i can't wrap my head around keyword research,lets say I have a social gaming community website and I'm trying to rank it first on some low competition keywords + some long tail keywords.The website has functions like leaderboards, profiles,events, competitions,etc so it's not actually a news related website but it will have a blog. My website being on the games niche It would imply that I should target words that contain the word "Games" but this word generates millions of searches globally so ranking first its nearly impossible if the website is brand new. This made me pursue generic keywords formed with 2 / 3 words like fresh games, new games, mmorpg games, fps games,etc which still generate lets say 30.000 searches globally each. Due to the different areas of the website like latest game events,latest games competitions,etc I'm confused If i should pursue website specific keywords like latest games events, fresh games events, latest games competitions, upcoming games competitions but these too generate 30.000 global searches each,so... 0.should i use generic keywords or keywords that include site features? So let's say I decide to pursue generic "games" keywords,due to a high competition based on the keyword I decide to go a layer deeper and for the keyword "fresh games" I obtain keywords like** "fresh games 2011,top fresh games 2011, upcoming fresh games** " and thus building a list of 30 keywords that contain " fresh games".If i do this for the rest of the keywords: ** new games, mmorpg games, fps games,etc** I end up with a list of 10.000 keywords or more since each keyword generates other keywords. Is this the correct approach ? since generating 10.000 keywords sounds a lot and I'm getting the feeling that It's not how it supposed to be done,like were would I insert 10.000 keywords? So how do I know which keywords to pick and aim in order to try to get no.1 ranking? and why those? How many keywords should I use? and where should i put them? since it's not a news website so writing a lot of articles isn't an option. Should I focus on 2 words keywords with around 10.000-30.000 seaches or 2 words keywords + long tail keywords with less traffic like 100 - 5000? Is there a guide for the Keyword Analysis Tool since if i enter "fresh new games" i get a 39% keyword difficulty,is that hard to rank? and I don't know what all those color mean since some of them have higher numbers then others that are found at the top and how can i get beat a website that has has rank 10. So hopefully with your help & by some miracle I will finally be able to build a keyword list. Thank you !
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | arching0