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Author: Mike Valentine Article source: http://www.selfseo.com/. Used with author's permission.
Google recently announced a change to their "Sitemaps" program. It went from a protocol meant for Python programmers and XML wizards to a much kinder, gentler (and friendlier to webmasters) program to help get all of your pages crawled and indexed. It's called "Google Webmaster Central. The tools can now be used and understood by most small business site owners. Google explains everything and lists Sitemaps resources at: https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html
To use Google sitemaps, you must first sign up for a Google Account. If you already use Google Adwords, Analytics, Gmail or other Google provided tools, you can use your existing account to submit a Google sitemap for your site. Get an account at the following URL if you don't already use Google services: https://www.google.com/accounts/ NON-PROGRAMMER SMALL BUSINESS WEBMASTERS WANT SIMPLICITY Many webmasters struggle to understand even the simplest HTML and meta tags and after visiting the Sitemaps program page when it was first announced in the summer of 2005, those small business site owners went away sadly shaking their heads and mumbling. They complained, "I can't even add PERL scripts to my own CGI bin and properly set permissions on page files - how am I going to install and debug a Python script on my server, run cron jobs and generate XML files?" Apparently Google heard all that grumbling and came back with the newly released "Webmaster Central" to answer the concerns of excess complexity. They no longer require you to be a geek to get all your pages into their index. They've created tools to make the job of submitting all of your pages for inclusion in their index very much easier to handle. http://www.google.com/webmasters/ The first listed "Site Status" tool lets you check indexing of your sites. If you enter an address into that search box and press the "Next" button, they'll return a page with a button labeled "Take me to Google Sitemaps" and encouraging use of the sitemaps tools, regardless of whether you've already submitted that sitemap or not. They'll list some minor details about the site entered such as: Pages from your site are included in Google's index.
Some of these pages are indexed without a title or description.
Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Aug 18, 2006 They list "Potential indexing problems" and then state: More details about your site may be availableBy using Google Sitemaps, you can learn more details available only to site owners, such as: •
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