Add a Sitemap file to your Magento shop

A sitemap is what?

The Sitemap is as its name suggests, a plan of your site that contains links to all pages of your site.

For search engines (Google, Yahoo, VeoSearch ...) a site without visiting Paris sitemap returns without a plan!

That is, the robot will scan your engine website with links that are available, but may not index many pages it will be "hidden". Returning to our example with Paris, you'll visit places easily accessible, but do not linger in the streets.

We focus more closely with the interests of SiteMap for Magento : if the robot indexes the first page of your site, but such indexing, not product pages or the pages categories it has referenced your page reception with your featured products, or your introduction. To the benefit is close to zero.

Therefore it may be interesting to take a few minutes to try to create this sitemap for your Magento store. Indeed you will have the beautiful site of e-commerce over the design world, or with more products, if the customer does not find you he will not visit your site.
The creation of the sitemap will allow you to optimize the ranking of your Magento store for the search engines to index all your products.

Create the sitemap of your shop with Magento

Magento includes basically a tool to generate the SiteMap of your e-commerce. We will see how use it.
Go to the Magento admin panel, then "Catalog> Google Sitemaps".

Then click the button at the top right "Add Sitemap".

Fill out the form:
Filename: sitemap.xml
Path: /
Store View: French

In the path (PATH), you can specify a folder name to store your Sitemap file for example / map / (This may also be necessary if you do not have write permission on the root of your Magento store ).

Reminder: if you want to give write permission to the folder containing your sitemap file with Filezilla click the right button on your file, then select "File Attributes" and then check the first checkbox: "Write." Finally, click on "Save & Generate".

Your sitemap is created, and is located at http://maboutiquemagento.com/sitemap.xml.

Magento Send your Sitemap file to Google Webmaster tools

This step requires that you have a Google Account. If you do not have one, you can create it on the same page.
See you at: https: / / www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Log in, then return the address of your online store and click on "Add Site".

Click on the name of your site, then the left menu, select Sitemaps.

top right, following your internet address, enter the name on your xml file. Then click on "Submit a Sitemap".

You should now have a confirmation message.

Several hours may elapse before displaying a report in your account to your Google Sitemaps.

Problems with Sitemap file generated

Unfortunately, the tool for Sitemap Magento has some shortcomings.
Indeed, it can sometimes create items inviting the robot to go on a 404 page (not existing).
To resolve this problem, simply edit the sitemap.xml file (with notepad for example), and remove blocks problematic.
For example: imagine that the report tells us that Google page
"Http://www.maboutiquemagento.com/index.php/htc-touch-diamond.html" does not exist. Edit your sitemap, and search the next block to remove it.

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