Google WebMaster Tools – SiteMap Submission
Dec 4, 2009 Search Engine Optimization
I had a little trouble submitting my sitemap successfully so I thought I would share a little information to maybe save you a little time.
The goal for my website and this blog is to get my site to Page One of Google and ultimately be the number one listing among the more than 23 million results for “Professional Website Maintenance”. Currently I am on Page One and ranked number 8 which is quite impressive but I am not getting a lot of hits as of yet.
A few months back I had registered a sitemap using the Google Webmaster tools. If you are not setup with that yet, I strongly recommend you sign up (It’s free!!) as your first and most important step to Google SEO success. I googled “how to create a google sitemap file” and created a sitemap. I submitted the site and moved on to other aspects of Google optimization. I just noticed yesterday that my sitemap was not correct, Google found problems with it and it was not accepted.
The first error I got was:
We’ve detected that you submitted your Sitemap using a URL path that doesn’t include the www prefix (for instance, http://example.com/sitemap.xml). However, the URLs listed inside your Sitemap do use the www prefix (for instance, http://www.example.com/myfile.htm).
When I registered my site with Google WebMaster tools, I entered
http://landersweb.com
but my sitemap was referencing
http://www.landersweb.com
Editing my sitemap to reference http://landersweb.com (no www) fixed this problem.
Except now I had a new error.
Incorrect namespace
Your Sitemap or Sitemap index file doesn’t properly declare the namespace.
The fix for that one was to edit the urlset declaration from
<urlset xmlns=”http://sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9” xmlns:xsi=”http://w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance” xsi:schemaLocation=”http://sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd“>
to
<urlset xmlns=”http://sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9” >
voila, my sitemap is submitted, will keep you posted on how much it helps.
Tags: Google, Google Page One, Google Webmaster tools, Search Engine Optimization, SiteMap
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