This is a beginner’s guide to creating a sitemap for you website and submitting it to the search engines. I’ll use XML-Sitemaps.com in this tutorial, but you could use any online sitemap generation tool, if you want to. This guide will not teach you how to create one manually.

When Do I Need a Sitemap?

A sitemap tells search engines what pages are included in your website, how often they change, and what are their priorities. You don’t need to create one for a Blogger blog, as that is done automatically, but if you have a website of your own, you should create one.

How to Create a Sitemap

Go to XML-Sitemaps.com, and fill in the form. Fill in your website URL, change frequency, and last modified. You should usually leave the priority to 0.5, unless you know what you’re doing. When you’re ready, click Start.

It may take a couple of minutes for the site to be scanned, because the sitemap generator needs to download and analyze each page. Note that you might not want to do this very often if you are paying for your bandwidth as you go, because all pages will really be downloaded.

When the scan is ready, download the uncompressed XMP sitemap, and upload it to your website root directory with the name sitemap.xml. You could also take a look at the HTML sitemap, and tweak it to your needs, if you want a sitemap for visitors.

When you have the sitemap in place, edit your robots.txt file, or if you don’t have one, create it in your root directory. The file instructs search engine crawlers how to treat your website. For comprehensive information on robots.txt, see the Wikipedia article.

If you already have a robots.txt file, add the following line at the end, with your website URL substituted:

Sitemap: http://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

If you don’t have the file, create it into your website root directory, with the following contents, again with your URL substituted:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: http://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

Now search engine crawlers that support the robots.txt protocol should find your sitemap when they check your robots.txt the next time. To make sure the major search engines know your sitemap exists, submit it to Google and Yahoo!

Submit Your Sitemap

Lets first submit it to Google. You need a Google account for this, like a Gmail account. Log into Google Webmaster Tools. You need to add your site, if you have not yet done it. Write the URL into the box next to the Add Site button, and click the button.

You can now verify your site to access extensive stats about your website, but it is not necessary. You can submit a sitemap to an unverified website. Just click at the Sitemaps tab from the top, and then on the Add Sitemap link. Select ‘Add General Web Sitemap’ from the drop-down menu, and write your sitemap URL into the text box at the bottom. Then click Add Web Sitemap.

Google now knows about your sitemap, and will check it out soon. Next, lets submit to Yahoo! SiteExplorer. Again, a Yahoo! account is necessary to access the SiteExplorer. Your Yahoo! Mail login will do.

You should be taken to My Sites. Add your site if it’s not on the list, the process is similar to the earlier one. The site appears in the list after you add it. Click the manage button next to the site in question. You are taken to a page, where you can add a feed for your website. Type in you sitemap address, select ‘Web Site Feed’, and Add Feed.

That’s it. The two most important search engines are now aware of your sitemap, and the rest should find it eventually through your robots.txt file. The sitemap makes sure search engines know about each page on your site, so more of your pages should now be indexed.

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