Creating Site Maps for Search Engines

The following tutorial will show you how to create a simple visual CSS site map. To get started, click the Site Map icon by accessing the PluginLab panel in Dreamweaver MX 2004 and 8, or go to Insert > PluginLab > Site Map.

Step 1. Create the Site Map Structure:

To create main levels of your site map, type or browse the URLs in the URL field and type in their titles in the Title fields. Click the button to add each new entry.

Checking in the Take Title from URL box will help you to avoid unnecessary typing and save the significant amount of your time, as all titles will be taken from the pages tag titles for each URL defined.

To make the sub levels, simply type the URLs and titles, and use the button to move the level and create the second sub level node.

By clicking the button you can easily create unlimited node levels.

Easily create site maps based on your menu structure. Simply press the button to export the structure from your menus, and then import it to your site map by pressing the button.

Step 2. Set Site Map Properties:

Define custom Site Map properties for each page. Checking in the Include in Search Engine box will add a certain URL in search indexing. Please note the pages with unchecked boxes won't be indexed.

URL Priority option enables you to set a specific priority rate for each page of your site. The most important pages for search indexing can be marked with the priority 1.0, and the least important with 0.1.

Determine site map protocol, selecting either http://, https:// (secure page) or ftp:// for file transfer pages, and define the change frequency that allows you to control how often this or that page will be indexed by search engine machines. Its important to let search engines know how frequently site map content changes from always to hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly or never.

Step 3. Search Engine Optimization:

For generating Google XML maps, Yahoo urllist.txt file or ROR.XML maps for all other xml-based search engines, check in the appropriate boxes in the Search Engine Files tab.

You can easily browser the folder where you want to store your site maps by clicking the button, or save it anywhere on your PC by pressing the button for quick save. Please note all these site map files are saved in site root on default.

Easily submit your site maps at Google, Yahoo or www.rorweb.com by pressing the Google, Yahoo!, ROR.XML buttons.