The following two articles can be used to great affect to manually create a sitemap page perfect for any site. The first article creates a rather bland but search friendly list of headings and links to all pages in an unordered list. The second article give great ideas for customizing the output/display of the page using CSS.

Improve Your Rankings with a Sitemap That Works: The HTML
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-O...Works-The-HTML/

Improve Your Rankings with a Sitemap That Works: The CSS
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-O...-Works-The-CSS/

Note: in the comments of the first article a reader noted that it would be better to change the <h2 /> tags to wrap outside the <a /> tag rather than in it. This: - rather than this -
I also wanted to mention that when the article suggests using the same - id="whatever" - in multiple places, that you should change this to using a - class="whatever" - instead, as an id attribute is only supposed to be used once per page. Further tweaking things a bit, the end of the article suggests two slightly different style sheets, one for IE and one for Mozilla/Firefox and using JavaScript to detect a user, but I don't usually suggest that either. Other than that, the steps worked pretty well. In just a few minutes, using notepad, I made an example matching what they have done in the two articles and am adding it as an attachment to this post. Try it out and enjoy! [attachmentid=39]

Thanks MonsterMOD

I will redo mine tonight!
Hope it will help me.

:-)

Thanks so much for posting this James!

I'm going to "bite the bullet" and start on a site map this weekend. Admittedly, it's something I should have done a looooong time ago.

Your example was terrific... would you mind having a looksy at my site and offering up some suggestions for my sitemap?

I'll give you everyone a bit of extra incentive. I created mine last week and have already noticed that g**gle and MSN are sending me traffic from it. Kinda wierd, 3-5 word phrases like (divided picnic basket) (barbeque silverware baskets ). I can't seem to get Yah00's spider "slurp" to visit. I haven't seen it in the stats for weeks.

Goog & M$N seem to have liked the site map :-) and at least goog is starting to show me a little bit of love

iNetVentures

You are very welcome crashingflwrgrl,

And I wouldn't mind helping you to create your own site map. Actually what I wanted to do was take it a step further and formulate exact steps, in detail, to do what is described but specific to the MonsterCommerce shopping cart. So far this is still in rough format, mostly in my head but here is the direction I am thinking -

1. Download products using DataPort
2. Sort by Category column
3. Remove any product details that will not be needed on the site map. This would be everything except:
(a) Category column
(b) Product name column
© URL column
(d) ???
4. Concatenate in this spreadsheet HTML into the URL column to change - http://example.com/index.asp?x- to - <a href="http://example.com/index.asp?x"> ...
5. Concatenate more HTML tags with the product names to add </a> after the name...
6. Combine the output above into one column, with the result looking something like this - <a href="http://example.com/index.asp?x">product name</a>
7. Save the resulting spreadsheet, still in .CSV format.
8. Open the .CSV file in a text editor program (this could be notepad if your product list is small or you can download any of these [insert list here] for free if won't open in notepad.
9. Using find/replace in the text editor, wrap each link in an <li />, then manually separate out each group of products by main categories with a <ul />. Add <h2 /> tags for the category names, and link these if you want too...

Obviously, this doesn't cover it all yet, but it gives you the basic idea. There are also many site map creator tools out there that will 'spider' a site and create a list of links for you.

I'm hoping to improve the steps above and actually make the steps detailed enough for anyone's needs. I could even suggest using the built in style sheets to style the page so the design would somewhat follow the rest of the site. But are there any suggestions at this point? Let me know what you think.

Well, Since I have stolen James Site Map example above, making only Heading and link changes so far, I should start out by saying Thank You James.

Now I am hoping to beg, borrow and steal some more suggestions to get the site map where I need it.

First of all, I would like to have the top of page look exactly like my other pages but when I try and add that code it throws the entire Site Map into rubble. Anyone have any ideas on how I can do this?

I did not add any of the other code that is on the top of my other pages, for example:



Does that need to be in there? Is there anything else that I am missing?

Also, How do I reduce the "White Space" Below the category headers to maybe half that size. I can not seem to find what is setting up that space.

Using the format that James layed out, is it going to automatically adjust for screen resolution/size?

Here is the link to James Site Map on my site, any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Site Map

Doug

What about for those of us that know nothing about html?

I have a very simple site map on my site, but would love to be able to categorize everything.

Any chance that might offer a site map generator for their users anytime in the future?

Heartland, there is plenty of software you can use to generate a site map for your site. I've never used any, so I won't even try to suggest any. Hit any search engine and you'll find plenty from cheap to expensive... maybe even free.

Sometimes you can get a trial for free at least and that may be all you need.

While I'm not saying it's a waste of time to create a sitemap, it can be very useful, especially if you change the names of pages etc. add in text for categories/sub-categories etc....

Personally I have never bothered with any of my clients. What is the point of making a sitemap for a 7,000 or 12,000+ page site which is already properly linked, spidered and fully indexed due to the very way that a site is built?

Of course if you use custom navigation with flash or javascript etc. then that can change, but normal sites are all set really.

Oh geez, for a client with some 6,000 products I was annoyed when Google said my book client had 18,000 pages indexed - now it's saying 91,000 pages! Now I know that is not the real number they have indexed, but come on, this is silly.

2 pages per product, plus a 3rd page for the email a friend (that should NEVER be in the index, but they are) would yield about 18,000+ pages or so. It only shows the first 1,000 results, so who knows what they have in the database.

No need to thank me, but you are quite welcome. I do my best to help where I can.
This content is in no way required, but it is a good idea simply for code cleanup issues. If you are using HTML validators ( e.g. http://validator.w3.org/ ) it will help to specify what TYPE of document you have and the DOCTYPE is how the system/browser knows. If the doctype causes formatting issues, then simply don't use it until you have it worked out.

If you add the following to the <h1 /> {} section on your styles, you will be able to better control the space you are referring to. Adust this as necessary.

That is theoretically what is supposed to happen. What I notice on my screen is that the right column is showing up below the left column and they are not side-by-side. To fix this, you may want to adust the #left and #right width settings from 50% to 45%. This appears to fix the problem for me.

Thanks for posting your example Drobins. I hope that it helps. I agree with newageweb a bit in the sense that if you linking well to your categories and product pages, there is no reason why Google won't find all of your information. The recommendation behind the Sitemap is to help G and the other spiders to find it faster.

Now as for MC creating this pages auto-magically? We do something quite wonderful automatically already with the SEO catalog. This does not cover EVERY page, only product pages and no Category or other pages. Some clients have brought up the concern that these catalog pages may be creating duplicate content which might cause a long-run issue. While our tests don't show this to be a problem, we continue to keep a very watchful eye on it.

Ideas for creating a sitemap like this or other 'spider-helpers' are a good possibility in the future, though I don't know of any specifics. For the time being, the manual method described here is all I can offer. However, it does not take very long depending on your category structure and the number of products you have. Good job!

James,

I always forget to look at it through Firefiox! I have to remember that because everything looked good with IE.

I have them appearing side by side now but have other issues that I can not seem to fix. Please look at the right side of each column. I can not get them lined up properly or get the borders to show up.

Thanks Again For your help.

Doug

James method of creating the sitemap with DATA port is the the way to go and is simple.
A shorter way using DATA PORT is to download your items and than do a FROOGLE EXPORT that will save you few steps

Do not forget once you created your site map to register to google site maps. you will have to insert a code (file) to you site via the file manager. (It takes a day or two depending on the response from the google server)

You might also consider to have 2 site maps residing in your file manager sitemap.html and sitemap.txt (they should reside on the primary directory - not in subfolders

I hope it helps

I'm taking a look at the file today and it looks great in both IE and Firefox, WOW! Good job. I can't speak to the alignment issues you are having. From what it looks like to me, the two columns only get out of sync because of the <h2 /> tags taking up more vertical space then the <li /> individually.

But I don't see it as causing too much of a problem. You want the two columns to be different and stand out from each other. I'd recommend increasing the spacing, just for helping someone who is seeing it visually.

One recommendation I also have is that there is a <%DRAW%> function in your header for that HTML page, but for obvious reasons this won't work. It doesn't show in IE, but it does in Firefox, so I'd remove it.

The following is to keep everyone up to speed on the term 'sitemap'. There are a lot of different definitions thrown about for the term 'sitemap'. The one we have created here is a great HTML file and will help customers as well as the search engine.

The Google Sitemaps system is slightly different and also a good idea to help Google (but not a visible file for your customers). This option would be implemented by uploading a sitemap.txt file, which you would then submit at -
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemap/
- and you would want to use a .TXT file.

The Google Sitemaps page describes using a .XML file, but reading further will show you that it doesn't have to be saved as .XML. The Google page also suggests using a file to automatically create it using Python, but the MC servers will not have Python installed. However, there are several other ways to create this file, such as a third-party program that scans your site and lists the files in the proper format. One can be found here -
http://www.coffeecup.com/google-sitemapper/

I hope this helps.

James,

THe site map that you created and "I borrowed"... Am I actually supposed to have links to ALL my products on this one?

I thought the complete site map with products is what we submit to Google.

Or should the be the same?

By the way, Thanks again for all your help on this. I am removing the 'Drawcart function and replacing it with a link now...

Thanks

Doug

The sitemap file can have links to whatever pages you want to "map". Obviously, you should be judicious and if you have 10,000, then you want to make the page only link to the categories.

The page you have now is just large enough, so I wouldn't change a thing. Good job!

Hi everyone,
I'm going crazy, finally going to open in a few days and been playing with the sitemap since 6am.

I am having alignment issues, and need to fix these before I can customize the map anymore. Can someone please look and maybe give an idea of what could be wrong, since the columns are not lining up and there is a lot of "dead" space.
site map
http://www.obscuria.com/sitemap.html

I have tried using the "margin-bottom: 0px;" on the H1 and H2 tagsas suggested, but that didn't seem to help the problem. The link to the custom css is in the top of the code...

Any help would be really appreciated.

Jeff

Well I finally got the map to look right. I simply copied and pasted the example code with the css actually in the html page and changed settings and entered my links.(Instead of building from scratch) I still dont completly understand why somethings are being placed where they are, but it looks how I want it to look in IE, but not in Opera yet.

Does anyone have any idea how to make things look better in Opera?

James,

Is there a way to add graphics to this Sitemap? Nothing fancy, just a small version of a logo? Just like a flavicon of sorts?....

Thanks!