Appearing on the first page of search results is the wish of everyone who owns a website. Staying between the top 3 (three) results then, arduous task.

But not impossible when working with that goal. By using various SEO techniques you can optimize your page to get better results in the short and long term.

One of these many techniques, is the technology for mapping of pages of the site, called sitemap.

Google Webmasters

If you’ve never heard of sitemap, or if you do not quite understand what it’s for, you’re probably thinking: What does google have to do with sitemap?

All! sitemap is a way to tell search engines that your site exists. And in a way it “eases” their work, as you are delivering to them a document with all url’s already mapped out of your store. All they need to do is check and index (to put you in the search results).

If you do not have an account with google webmasters, go to: www.google.com/webmasters and create an account.

Once you have done all the procedure to register your site, and confirm that you are the owner of the site, some tools will be available to you. In one of these tools, you inform the url of your site that has the sitemap.xml file.

Webmaster Sitemap Management

If your site has just been launched, it will come to exist for google from this time, after you add a site map.

Creating the Sitemap

But to inform a sitemap, you need to create one. And in Magento this is done very easily and quickly. To do this go to your backend in:

Catalog > Google Sitemap [Create Sitemap]

All you have to do is name the file (sitemap.xml), enter your storage directory (home directory), and store view (if multiple stores are installed).

Creating Sitemap in Magento

Click Save & Generate, and your site map will be ready to be verified by google webmasters.

Configuring your Sitemap

When generating a sitemap, you have a mapping of the pages of your site, ie categories, contact pages, information, products, etc. And these pages can change over time, and each type of page has a relevancy.

So it is possible to configure in Magento, how the system should create your sitemap, and how often to update this information. To do this go to:

System> Catalog > Google Sitemap

The first options will be:

- Category Options
- Product Options
- CMS Pages Options

In these 3 (three) guides you inform the relevance of these pages (priority) and the frequency with which their contents will be updated. This “frequency” is just a suggestion for the google indexing system.

Already in the last tab, you have the “Generation Options“.

Magento Sitemap Scheduling

Where do you schedule to create/update your sitemap automatically. When you enable this function, the system will write to the server CRON its settings for processing.

So it is very important that your server has CRON enabled for this functionality to run correctly.

Success!