Create a Sitemap

A sitemap is like a giant crossroads for the Robot. Or, it’s like a city that has direct roads to any other city in the country. It’s a spot from which the Robot can get to any place easily.

In its simplest terms, a sitemap is a list of pages on your website. And there are two types of sitemaps. An HTML sitemap is made for human users mostly, to help them easily find the information they need.

An XML Sitemap (it’s normally called a Sitemap, with a capital S) is for Search Engines only. Create and submit a Sitemap, and thus you’ll make sure that Search Engines know about all the pages on your site, including URLs that can’t be naturally discovered by Search Engines’ crawlers.

A good example of an HTML sitemap is here:

And, here’s how an XML Sitemap looks like.

Now, what do you need for the Robot to visit all your pages, fast? Right, an accurate overall sitemap. In fact, there’re hundreds of tools that can help you generate one. You can use this, for example: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

As soon as you’ve made up your Sitemap, you have to submit it to Search Engines. This procedure varies for different Search Engines. I’ll now only help you with the biggest ones. Here you can find guidelines for Google.com (they have a webmaster tools section that helps you out): http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318

To add your sitemap to Bing:

1. Copy the link to your Sitemap file.
2. Sign in to your Bing Webmaster Tools account.
3. On the My Sites page, enter the URL for your site (e.g., http://www.mysite.com) and click the Add button.
4. Enter the URL for your sitemap file in the Add a sitemap field, and complete the rest of the required fields on the page.
5. Click the Save button.

If you need to submit to other Search Engines, look them up for instructions. Go to the Search Engine you need and type in submit sitemap and name_of_the_search_engine. You’ll find a submission form, or just some instructions. Follow the guidelines you get, and — here we go: you not only invited Search Engines’ Robots to visit your site, but ensured comfortable and easy travel!

As the sitemap has links to all the pages on a site, so don’t forget adding a new page to the list when you make one. You won’t need to submit it to Search Engines again, just update the sitemap itself.

DO IT NOW!

Make a Sitemap and submit it to Search Engines. When you make new web pages on your site, add them to your Sitemap.

Of course you may suspect there’s an easier and faster way to create and upload your sitemap. By easier I mean that this can be done automatically and literally in a blink of an eye, with the help of the tool I’ll finally tell you about.