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Google Sitemaps - The Simpler Way
The problem with the Google way of creating your sitemap, is that it is extremely complicated. I have an inkling, that the reason that they make it complicated, is that they only want people who have a certain level of techiness to be able to use it.
What I am going to present below, is a way to still take advantage of Google Sitemap, but in a way that a 10 year old child could also do. The only requirements are that you are able to FTP to your server space.
Step 1
Either login if you already have a google account or sign up for one from here
Step 2
Download a wonderful piece of free software called Xenu from:
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html
Apart from checking for broken links on your site, it will also create a list of urls on your site
Where it says: List of valid URLs you can submit to a search engine (HTML or plain text), simply copy and paste these urls into the textarea below:
Step 3
Everything between the following two lines, you should copy and paste into a file called sitemap.xml:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84 http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">
Step 4
You should now upload this file sitemap.xml to the root directory of your server. This is important for the next step.
Step 5
Return to https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login which was the first page which you opened up in your web browser.
Click on "Add your first sitemap"
Enter in the url of where you uploaded your sitemap in the last step and press on the Submit URL button.