How to Create a Sitemap

Creating Your Own

Start a new document in a text editor. The editor should be a plain text editor, such as Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac. This method is best suited for small sites, as you will be manually entering in each page.

Create your sitemap template. Paste the following into your text document. Basic sitemaps are XML files that are submitted to search engines in order for them to be able to read your site easier. By using this format, you can quickly list all of the pages on your site: http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/page1 YYYY-MM-DD always/hourly/daily/weekly/monthly/yearly/never 1.0 http://www.example.com/page2 http://www.example.com/page3

Replace the example with your URLs. Visit your site in a browser and go through each link, copying the URLs from your browser’s address bar and pasting them into the template. If you have more pages than space in the template, simply copy a “” section to the bottom as many times as you need.

Use the optional tags. In the first entry of the example, you will see several tags that can be added to each URL, these are optional but may make crawling your page easier for the bots. The tag is the date that your page was last modified. The tag shows about how often your page is updated. Always means that it is updated every time a user views it, while Never means that it is archived. The tag allows you to rank the importance of each page on your site in relation to the other pages. This value can range from 0.0 to 1.0. The default priority for all pages is 0.5.

Save the file as an XML file. Click File and select Save As. Use the “Save as type” menu and select All Files. Change the file extension from “.txt” to “.xml” and save the file as “sitemap.xml”.

Upload the sitemap to your server. Once your sitemap file is complete, you need to place it in the root folder of your web server. This is the lowest directory on your web server. The final URL for your sitemap should be www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Submit your sitemap to the search engines. All of the major search engines allow webmasters to submit the URL for the file to their web crawlers. Log into the Webmaster Tools for the search engine that you want to submit to and navigate to the Sitemap section. Paste the URL for your sitemap into the field.

Using a Generator

Browse the available services. There are a variety of sitemap generators available, both free and paid. You can use online services. Server-side tools, or downloaded programs to generate your sitemaps. Free services typically have a 500-1000 page limit. Popular programs and services include: InSpyder SiteCrawler XML-Sitemap Free sitemap generator.com G-Mapper

Check if your CMS (Content Management System) has a sitemap creation program. Many CMSs such as WordPress have sitemap generators that can be accessed by logging in to your Dashboard. These are often preferable to using a third-part program because they are more suited for the content on your site.

Choose an alternative sitemap. Beyond standard XML sitemaps, there are alternative sitemaps for specific types of sites. If you are building a sitemap for Mobile, Image, News, or Video sites, Google supports specialized sitemaps for those kinds of sites. If you need to build a specialized sitemap, check that the program you are using supports those formats.

Submit your sitemap. All of the major search engines allow webmasters to submit the URL for the file to their web crawlers. Log into the Webmaster Tools for the search engine that you want to submit to and navigate to the Sitemap section. Paste the URL for your sitemap into the field. You can also add a reference to your sitemap in your robots.txt file. Simply add the line Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml to the file.