How to Create a Google Sitemap

How to Create a Google Sitemap

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process. The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It is one of the most important SEO tips and Tricks for a website or blog.

• Sign in to Google webmaster tools with your Google account at:http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps . If you don't have a Google account, you will need to create one by SIGN UP.

• Add your site to your webmaster tools account.

• Verify your site, either by creating a blank HTML file with a certain name (generated by Google), or by inserting a specific meta tag in your site index.

• Go to http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators

• Click on the Webmaster Tool button.

• Enter you site name and URL.

• Hit the play button in the bottom-left corner.

• Click on the Sitemap tab.

• Wait until all the files have finished loading, then select the one which location is the root of your website.

• Click on the Save Sitemap button, then on the pop-up menu that comes up, click on Google Sitemap.

• Save the file to you sites directory (or just anywhere if you don't have one).

• Upload the file to your web server at the highest publicly available directory (normally "www" or "public_html").

• Go back to Google's webmaster tools, and click on the Sitemaps tab.

• Click "Add a Sitemap".

• Select General Web Sitemap on the drop down list.

• Enter the URL of you sitemap. Eg. http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

• Click on Add Web Sitemap.