Google Webmaster
Google Webmaster Tools provides statistics, diagnostics and management of Google's crawling and indexing of your website, including Sitemap submission and reporting. Read more about this on Google.
Please note, if the information below is just too much to take in, we can do this for you for a small fee of just £10 + vat.
Create a Google account. Sign in and access Webmaster Central and select Webmaster Tools. In the dashboard, add your site.
Verify your site
Choose the option to verify by adding a meta tag, Google will provide a line of code. Simply email this to Ovata Design and we will input the code into your website free of charge.
Add a sitemap
You will need to create a sitemap and then upload it to your website. This form of sitemap is basically a coded list of the pages within your website which enables Google to crawl your site more efficiently and quicker. It is not the same type of sitemap you may come across on websites that list pages for visitors to click and navigate through the website.
Remember: you will need to create and upload a new sitemap everytime you add a page to your website or rename an existing page.
Creating A Sitemap
You can create your sitemap here - http://www.sitemapdoc.com
- Fill in your URL (web address) - eg. http://www.mywebsite.co.uk
- Click Create Map
Look through the URLs of the pages. Make sure you exclude any pages that contain any reference to admin, login, .cgi or any pages that have '?' in the url. These pages should not really be picked up by the sitemap generator but the generator is third party software and therefore we cannot guarantee this. You can exclude pages by clicking UnCheck.
Your pages should all read similar to these examples:
www.domain.co.uk/page_name
www.domain.co.uk/page_name.html
www.domain.co.uk/folder/page_name.html
If in any doubt, keep going, but please ask Ovata Design to check your file once you have uploaded it. Don't be put off, we are happy to check your progress, help talk you through it or even modify your file after uploading if needs be.
- Edit the Change Frequency
- Set the priority - generally you will leave the priority as normal or 0.5. Priority sets the importance of the pages in relation to each other NOT priority above your competitors!
- Click Google Sitemap
- Follow the instructions
The sitemap code you will see is a bit complecated and may not make much sense, but it should look similar to this:
Please make sure your sitemap is called: sitemap.xml
Uploading A Sitemap To Your Website
The upload facility page is available in your sites control panel. Just browse for your newly saved file and click upload.
Adding The Sitemap to Google
Return to Google Webmaster Tools, click on 'add' and fill in the URL in this format:
http://www.yourdomain.co.uk/sitemap.xml
Add a robots.txt file
This file is a text file that tells the search engine crawlers which pages they can and can't visit. We recommend using our standard file, you can view it here.
Copy and paste the text into notepad and save as robots.txt, and then upload the file in the uploads section within your sites control panel.
Please do not hesitate to contact Ovata Design for help and advice with Google Webmaster Tools. If this is all too much to take in, we can do this for you for a small fee of just £10 + vat.
The upload section is a relatively new feature to the Content Management System, if you do not currently have this installed please let us know, we will make the necessary updates free of charge.
