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

1. Go to the XML Sitemap builder
2. Enter the homepage path of your website (e.g. www.mydomain.com)
3. Enter the change frequency of your website (be honest
4. Leave the rest as it is and click on start to let the tool make your sitemap
5. When it is done download the compressed XML Sitemap version (.gz) and copy it to your root folder
   
6. 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.
7. 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.

8. 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.
9. 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)