How to create a sitemap (with images)

The sitemap of a website is one of the most important tools to help increase traffic to your site. Registering a good and effective sitemap with search engines greatly increases the chances that your site content will appear in relevant searches. If you are trying to make money from your website, take a few minutes to create and register a sitemap today. This guide will show you how to do it.

Steps

Method 1 of 2: Build Your Own Sitemap

Step 1. Create a new document in a text editor

The editor should work with simple text, such as Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac. This method is best suited for small sites, as you will have to enter each page manually.

Step 2. Create the template for your sitemap

Paste the following into your text document. Basic sitemaps are XML files that are submitted to search engines so they can more easily read your site. By using this format, you can quickly list all the pages on your site:

 http://www.example.com/ http://www.example.com/page1 YYYY-MM-DD always / hourly / daily / weekly / monthly / yearly / never 1.0 http://www.example.com/ page2 http://www.eexample.com/page3

Step 3. Replace the example with your URLs

Visit your site with a browser and go through each link, copying the URLs from the browser's address bar, and pasting them into the template. If you have more pages than space in the template, just copy a section "" at the bottom as many times as you need.

Step 4. Use the optional tags

In the first entry of the example, you will see several tags that can be added to each URL, they are optional but make it easier for search engine robots to explore.

The tag contains the date the page was last modified.
The tag shows how often the page is refreshed. 'Always' means that it is updated every time a user visits it, while 'Never' means that it is archived.
The tag allows you to rank the importance of each of the pages of the site in relation to the other pages. This value can range from 0.0 to 1.0. The default priority of all pages is 0.5.

Step 5. Save the file in XML format

Click File and select Save As. Use the "Save as type" menu and select All files. Change the file extension from “.txt” to “.xml” and save it as “sitemap.xml”.

Step 6. Upload the sitemap to your server

Once you have completed the sitemap file, you will need to place it in the root folder of your web server. It is the lower directory of the web server. The final URL of the sitemap should be www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Step 7. Register your sitemap with search engines

All major engines allow webmasters to record the URL of the file for their browsers. Sign up for the Administrator Tools of the search engine of your choice and navigate to the Sitemap section. Paste the URL of your sitemap into the corresponding field.

Method 2 of 2: Use a sitemap generator

Step 1. Browse the available services

There are a wide variety of sitemap generators, both free and paid. You can use online services, server-side tools, or download programs to generate your sitemap. Free services are usually limited to between 500 and 1000 pages. Some of the most popular programs and services are:

InSpyder
GSiteCrawler
XML-Sitemaps
Free sitemap generator.com
G-Mapper

Step 2. Check if your content management system (CMS) has a sitemap creation program

Many CMSs, like WordPress, have sitemap generators that can be accessed by logging into the dashboard. They are usually better than third-party programs, as they are more suitable for the content of your site.

Step 3. Choose an alternate sitemap

In addition to the standard XML sitemaps, there are alternative sitemaps for specific types of sites. If you are creating a sitemap for a mobile, image, news, or video site, you will see that Google has specialized sitemaps. If you need to create a specialized sitemap, check that the program you use supports these formats.