Website Marketing Directory — Search Engine Optimisation — Melbourne, Sydney, Australia

Ron Erdos

You may be missing out on valuable web traffic if your site has only a few pages listed in Google. Now you can use the following quick remedy to get all your pages listed in Google.

The Quick Remedy

What we are about to do is create a Google sitemap for your site. This is a small file that lists every page on your site in a format that Google finds easy to read. It is not the same thing as an ordinary sitemap (which is an actual page on your site and is designed for humans to read). 

The main benefit of a Google sitemap is that Google will be able to see all of your pages. It's like giving Google a map to your site and pointing out all the pages you have to offer.

Another benefit is that you can tell Google which pages you consider important. To use the earlier metaphor, now it's like giving Google a map of your site and saying "These three pages here - they are important. That page over there, that's not important".

For example, let's say you have a page that shows off a very profitable product. You would want this page to appear on Google before your privacy policy page, wouldn't you? Put another way, you don't want an unimportant page (such as your terms and conditions page) knocking your number-one seller off the top spot, do you?

Here's how to quickly and easily create a Google sitemap to get all your pages listed in Google, and in the right order.

How To Create A Google Sitemap

Google itself has a Google Sitemap Generator tool which is free to use. There are also other free or cheap tools commercially available which will generate a Google sitemap for you. All you have to do is type in your domain name and the free tool will create the Google sitemap for you. You can then assign a level of importance to each page (e.g. "High Importance", "Medium Importance" and "Low Importance") from within the tool. You would want to give your product pages "High Importance" and pages such as your privacy policy "Low Importance".

Next, simply download the Google sitemap (an XML file) to your computer.

The final step is to create a free Google Webmaster Account. Once you have done this, you will see some instructions for how to upload the Google sitemap to Google. 

All other things being equal, you should notice many more of your pages appearing in Google’s index after you submit your Google sitemap. You should be pleasantly surprised with the results!