[PLUG-TALK] Site map to be read by search engines

[Richard C. Steffens]

My wife read an article about folks making money by placing Google
advertising on their web sites and decided I should try that. There's a
ton of stuff describing how to go about it at:

https://www.google.com/adsense

I took a number of my old tour guide scripts, tweaked them a bit (they
still need more work), added some images, and posted them to one of my
Comcast sites.

One of the recommendations for getting the search engines to find the
site is to put up a site map. There are basic instructions for how to do
one manually, plus an open source site map generating tool they have
released, but as far as I can tell, it needs to be run on the web
server. Since I'm doing this on a Comcast site, I don't have that option.

They give instructions for the xml format they want used, so I started
one for the modest site. When I submit it, they tell me it has errors,
and tell me the line number. To me, it looks like their example,
verbatim, at that point, since it only got as far as the first <url>
description. Unfortunately, searching Google for more information
becomes circular -- it sends me to a page that sends me to another page
that sends me back to the one I started on.

Is anyone else using Google Adsense? Any ideas for better examples of
what sitemap.xml.gz should look like? Here's mine:

---------------------------------------------------------------------
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
 <loc>http://home.comcast.net/~nwtours/</loc>
 <lastmod>2007-11-10</lastmod>
 <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</ulr>
<url>
 <loc>http://home.comcast.net/~nwtours/MtStHelens/</loc>
 <lastmod>2007-11-06</lastmod>
 <changefreq>yearly</changefreq>
</ulr>
<url>
 <loc>http://home.comcast.net/~nwtours/gorge/</loc>
 <lastmod>2007-11-06</lastmod>
 <changefreq>yearly</changefreq>
 </ulr>
</urlset>
---------------------------------------------------------------------

They tell me the problem is on line 6, but they don't tell me what the
problem is.

I realize that this sitemap is incomplete, since there are seven pages
at each of the second levels. I thought I'd try getting the simple
version working first, and then move on to a more complicated one.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens