How to Make a Sitemap Free Online
Free online sitemap generator to generate a google xml sitemap
First before I get into how to create a website sitemap for free, I want to inform you of the purpose of sitemaps. The first and main part of running an online business is to get known on the search engines. To do this you need to submit your website to the search engines. This alone is not the greatest method, you want the search engines to index your pages faster, find what has changed faster. This is all dine by a simple xml sitemap. Basically a sitemap is an xml file with a list of URL's of the pages or posts on your website or blog, including the date of your website page's last modification, and the priority of that page or post. This xml sitemap file is then submitted to the search engines so they can easily find your pages, know which ones have changed by looking at this xml sitemap file, and know which ones have a higher priority so it will index those pages first. So what is the sitemap's purpose? The purpose of a sitemap file is to notify the search engines what pages exist on your website, what pages have been changed or added, and which pages have a higher priority. Very good, see simple? now that you know the purpose of sitemaps, we need to create a website sitemap. Are you ready to learn how to make a sitemap?
If you are using a wordpress blog you don't need to continue reading on how to create a website sitemap, there is a Google sitemap generator plugin for wordpress blogs that automatically generate a google xml sitemap and submits it to the 4 major search engines, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask. If I installed your blogging software then you already have the sitemap creator: Google sitemap generator plugin installed, activated, and setup already. If you still want to learn how to create a sitemap you are more than welcome to continue reading on how to create xml sitemaps.
We are almost ready to make a sitemap, but there is prep work we need to do first. So before we create a sitemap we need to create robots.txt file and/or edit your meta tags for robots. The purpose of a robots.txt file is to tell the search engine robots what they are allowed to crawl or index. Say if there is a page on your website that you don't want them to crawl, you can simply add this url to your robots.txt file in the disallow section. For the example robots.txt file I will show you this will allow all search robots to index all pages on your website and then tell the search engine robots where it can find your sitemap.xml file. After you create your robots.txt file for your website you will need to upload it to your root directory, most likely public_html directory. Here is the contents of my robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://247-coach.com/sitemap.xml
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
Which you can see does not tell the search engines where your sitemap.xml file it, but this tells the search engines they are allowed to index this page and follow the links to other pages on your website.
Now we are ready to learn how to create a sitemap! You can look at my sitemap example which is my current sitemap.xml file on my website. The structure of an xml sitemap is simple. Your code for your xml sitemap should be in this format:
<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://247-coach.com/</loc>
<priority>1.00</priority>
<lastmod>2008-08-09T08:11:54+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
</url>
</urlset>
<url></url> tag for each page on your website. the <loc></loc> tag in a sitemap.xml file is used to tell the search robots the location of this page, it's URL. The <priority></priority> section is used to tell the search engines how important this page is. Values for this tag in your sitemap is 0.00-1.00 and any increment inbetween. The <lastmod></lastmod> section in your sitemap is to tell the search engines when the last date and time this page was modified or changed. Finally the <changefreq></changefreq> section is to let the search engine know how often this page changes, you can use values hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. There are many formats of sitemaps, but the code sitemap is the most common and also read by almost every search engine out there. There is also sitemap.xml.gz which is the same thing, but it is compressed with gzip to make the file smaller, this is used for if you have a website over maybe 500 pages, then I'd consider using a compressed sitemap file.
For those of you that have too many pages to write out a xml sitemap file by hand, or just for the lazy, either way there are many free online sitemap generators you can use. These free sitemap generators will generate a google xml sitemap for you, creating the sitemap.xml file you will upload to your server in the root directory. There are also some paid for site-map creators and builders out there on the internet, do not pay for them, they are not worth it when you can create a free website sitmap by hand yourself or even use a free online google code sitemap generator! To generate a google xml sitemap using a free site-map generator, I recommend you use XML Sitemaps Generator they are a free sitemap generator if you have less than 500 pages on your website. To use this xml site-map generator you enter your starting URL which will be your domain name, select your change frequency, select last modified date and time, click start! On the next page it will give you a list of a few different formats of sitemaps, just download the sitemap.xml or if you have a lot of pages or have limited bandwidth you can download the sitemap.xml.gz sitemap format. Now you need to upload this sitemap to your website's root directory.
Sitemap Generator Tips: When using free online sitemap generators they will create your sitemap but they can not tell how important each page is to set your priorities properly, nor can they place the last modified tag properly on each page, as they will say each page was last modified on the same time and same day. If you do use a free online site-map generator make sure you atleast go in and tweak it a litte bit by changing your last modified and priority tags. Keep records of the date and times you last modified each page, if you want your website's pages to get indexed quickly and properly. If you generate a sitemap and submit it to google and it see's every page was modified it will rescan every page again, not just the ones that have been changed, and if you remember reading previously on my website about how the search engine robots work, they only stay on your website for a certain amount of time and then leave, if your sitemap says 20 pages have been modified, but yet only page 19 and 20 were modified, it will start scanning from page 1 wasting it's time, then it will probably leave before it even gets to page 19 and page 20. That is why you want to tweak this sitemap file slightly.
I hope all this information about sitemaps didn't confuse you and also helps get your website indexed quickly in the search engines, so you can start getting your website ranked. If you have any questions or comments about sitemap.xml files or robots.txt files please let me know by asking on my Sitemap Help Forum. Now that you have your robots.txt and sitemap.xml uploaded to your website, you can read: How to Submit Your Website to a Search Engine for Free!
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