SEO: How To Create a Google Sitemap in 5 Minutes

May 24, 2008 in how-to tools

Usually Google’s crawler Googlebot will find each and every page on your web site, as long as a link known by Google points to it. This way has its disadvantages, both for Google and webmasters as well. Google saves a whole of a lot of machine time and bandwidth costs, site owners get their new content earlier on Google’s SERPs and reduce their server load by Googlebot no longer spidering archived content too frequently.

What’s a sitemap?

Lets take a short view at the basics. If you know what sitemaps are, you can jump to the next part. By placing a formatted xml file with site map on your webserver, you enable Search Engine crawlers (like Google) to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.

Let’s do it!

So how do you create a sitemap? The best way is to use plugins for your blog or cms, which will get updated everytime you update you files and will inform google automatically. If you dont have a blog or cms you can do it by hand or you use this nice free sitemap builder.

Create a google sitemap

Go to the XML Sitemap builder
Enter the homepage path of your website (e.g. www.mydomain.com)
Enter the change frequency of your website (be honest
Leave the rest as it is and click on start to let the tool make your sitemap
When it is done download the compressed XML Sitemap version (.gz) and copy it to your root folder
You can open the file with an text-editor of your choise and change the priority of documents you think. You can use and value between 0.1 and 0.9, but be aware to only give really important sites the higher value.
The following is very important, so that all search engine bots will know you have a sitemap. Create a new file called
```
robots.txt
```
and add the following code to it:
```
User-agent: *
# Enter the path to your sitemap here
Sitemap: http://www.knowtebook.com/sitemap.xml.gz
```
Copy it in your root folder and upload it to your server with your new sitemap.
You are almost there! Go to Google Sitemap / Webmaster Tools and add your sitemap. If you do not have a webmaster account, just register and add your website. Now Google will scan your file and visit pretty soon all the pages you had in your index.
Finished! You might consider creating a new sitemap in a few weeks if your content has changed much. The result should somehow look like knowtebooks sitemap.

More great sitemap generator tools:

GSite Crawler for yahoo and google sitemaps
German sitemap creator where you can choose between the files you want in your sitemap
Generator by ScriptSocket
Generator which will ping google automatically if your changed a website (registration required)

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Whatever you want to say!

Your turn »

BestBit
Nov 17, 2011
No: 10 / ID: 9925

Very interesting free tool, but if you have a big site, with more than 500 pages, you have to pay for it.

Reinaldo Silva
Nov 15, 2010
No: 9 / ID: 7314

This is a good stuff. In my site has a tool to made it automated.

Utah Seo Inc
Mar 04, 2010
No: 8 / ID: 5743

I’ll have to check and see if my sites even have sitemaps on them, I don’t think the free websites do.

Knowtebook
Feb 22, 2010
No: 7 / ID: 5677

there should be a setting which limits the ammount of entries. what do you see?

Chicago Fence Company
Feb 22, 2010
No: 6 / ID: 5675

I am not seeing all my pages in the sitemap generator. is there anything I can do about it?

Bill
Oct 01, 2009
No: 5 / ID: 4980

The number of plugins available for Wordpress is great. Using the sitemap plugin will certainly help the search engines find all the pages within ones site. Fortunately pinging Google works well too, but having a sitemap covers all the major search engines and acts as insurance to make sure all pages are indexed.

Knowtebook
Aug 26, 2009
No: 4 / ID: 4735

yeah. we can definately advise to use sitemap tools for search engines. wordpress has a great plugin submitting to msn, ask, yahoo and google. it saves you a lot of time and you can decide, which sites are to be indexed and a lot more.

Utah SEO
Aug 24, 2009
No: 3 / ID: 4711

I’ve used the xml-sitemaps.com tool as well, but there are some (Like Rand over at seomoz.org) who have spoken out against the practice of submitting sitemaps to Google and the other search engines, or that is, they’ve spoken up for not using sitemaps since you get information from not submitting that you might not get if you do submit, such as how long Google takes to naturally find your site and index the pages.

SEO Master
May 28, 2009
No: 2 / ID: 4319

This tool is really good and useful! I use it for many sites. But you forgot to say that for sites with +500 pages, the sitemap generator is not free.

zeeol
Aug 02, 2008
No: 1 / ID: 1595

I got it

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SEO: How To Create a Google Sitemap in 5 Minutes

What’s a sitemap?

Let’s do it!

Create a google sitemap