XML sitemaps and your site's indexing success

A sitemap, simply, is a layout of your site, sort of guideposts or signboards show the way to the various sections. You think of them as signboards containing the URL pointing to each section down the road.

In the past, sitemaps were created for users to see an overview of a site, pick and choose the links, no matter how deep, easily with the click of a button.

However, as websites grow on the internet and become more complex, search engines look for better ways to crawl sites and index more efficiently.

In 2005, Google launched its own protocol to crawl sites via sitemaps that are written in XML. This allowed Google bots (search engine robots - (tiny programmes that visit your site and go back to report) to track changes on the websites more efficiently.

Note however that sitemap is not a SEO tool and has no effect on general site ranking. What it does is to allow search engine bots to index your site more efficiently. In the case of Google, sitemaps allow for better pageranks.

How to create XML sitemaps?

There are several ways but I am going to show you two easy ways out of this:

1. Use an online xml sitemap generator .


2. Download a sitemap generator here and do it on your PC. (This requires installation on your PC. I have not used it but from the reviews, it appears to be quite popular. Judge it for yourself. )

Once your sitemap is created, upload it into the root directory of your site, ie. www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml Then submit to to Google