Jerry Wy.

How to Create a Sitemap Fast

How to create a Sitemap fast in xml

What is a Sitemap?

A Sitemap serves as a directory by listing all the links to all documents and files found in a website. Is is like a book content or similar, where all the information is listed there.
The benefit of having a Sitemap is basically to give good directions to Search Engine crawlers. It gives the spiders the correct information when certain keywords are entered in a search dialog.

Tips:

1 - Don´t go over 30 pages.
2 - Link the sitemap only to your homepage.
3 -Submit the Sitemap to the Google Webmasters tool. This tool asks for you to upload a sitemap in case the crawlers cannot have access to certain pages.
Here you specify all of your inner pages that you want the crawler to detect, and also certain parameters. The tool is really easy to use. It will tell you the number of URLs submitted, number of URLs in google index and more.

Below is a short example on how a sitemap looks like.

webSiteFullPath/
2010-08-28
monthly
1.0

webSiteFullPath/page1.html
2010-08-30
monthly
0.5


webSiteFullPath/page2.html
2010-08-30
monthly
0.5


webSiteFullPath/page3.html
2010-08-30
monthly
0.5

It is xml code. The fist lines use a xsd, which is a Schema (also a xml file) that validates the Sitemap. Then you specify all the urls you want the crawler to detect and a few parameters. These are:

- loc: Can be 2048 characters at most
- lastmod: Date the page was last modified (format YYYY-MM-DD)
- changefreq: Change frequency. Accepted values are: always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, never
- priority: Page Priority. Values between 1.0 (high priority) and 0.0 (low priority)

So, each URL you put in the sitemap should look something like this:

webSiteFullPath
2010-08-30
daily
1

(Remove the dots after the "<" symbol)

Also there are many tools out there than can build the sitemap for you. Just go to Google and search for "sitemap generator". The idea is for you to simply enter the URLs and the software will do the rest.

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