AspDotNetStorefront has a built-in Google sitemap that not many people know about.

Google allows website owners to submit sitemaps via Google Webmaster Tools. Submitting a sitemap to Google helps ensure that Google knows about all the pages on your site.

The built-in AspDotNetStorefront Google sitemap is dynamic; it changes as you add new categories, topics, and products to your site.

To get to the Google sitemap, type “googleindex.aspx” onto the end of your URL: www.YOURSITE.com/googleindex.aspx

You should see a page that looks something like this:

Submitting The Sitemap

To submit your sitemap to Google you first need to create a free account with Google Webmaster Tools.

Once you get your account setup correctly you’ll find all kinds good information that Google has about your website. You are looking for the “sitemaps” tab on the left hand side of the Webmaster Tools overview screen.

From here submitting a sitemap to Google is pretty easy. You just need to provide Google with the correct URL: YOURSITE.com/googleindex.aspx

Be aware – it’s common for some warnings to show up in the Google Webmaster Tools sitemap statistics when you submit this sitemap. This is usually because the priority level given to each page in the site map is the same since there is no way to flag different pages with a different priority level in the backend of AspDotNetStorefront. You do have the ability to set the priority per page type (Product, Entity, Topic) though.

Configuration

Login to the backend of your AspDotNetStorefront website and navigate to Configuration>Advanced>AppConfig Parameters. If you search for “googlesitemap” you will see all of the appconfigs that apply to the Google Sitemap.

These appconfigs allow you to adjust the change frequency and the priority level of entities, topics, and products.

For more information about Google sitemaps, take a look at this article.

Tags: ADNSF, AspDotNetStoreFront, Google, sitemap, Web Traffic

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 9:11 am and is filed under AspDotNetStoreFront, Google, SEO, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.