How to Create and Add Site Maps of Websites / Blogs in Webmaster Tool ?
After completeing your site navigation layout and creating pages structure, you need to create a sitemap for users as well as search engines so that every one know about structure of your site. This time I am talking about sitemap for search engines specially. Search Engines need site map of your site to index maximum pages of your site. Search engines like Google, Bing etc may crawl your Homepage or some main pages and index them but your many internal pages may be not properly indexed. Every webmaster wants to index more pages because increase number of indexed pages increase the chances to show your site in search results which results increase in traffic. That’s why submission of sitemaps are so important for search engines.
How to Create / Generate Sitemap :
Fortunately its very simple to generate sitemaps for your sites or blogs. There are many sites which provide a free service to generate sitemaps online and download them. I will share some good sites who do this job for but if you find any other site more better, you are free to use.
Step 1 :
Go to www.xml-sitemaps.com This is a good site to generating a sitemap for your site.
Step 2 :
Enter your complete site URL (Homepage URL) and Press ‘START’ Button.
SET all other options as defaults set frequency, Last modification and priority.
Step 3 :
After waiting some time Your sitemap is ready to download in multiple formats. Now download sitemap in uncompressed XML format and saved it on your local drive.
Other sites to create free site map :
www.web-site-map.com (Unlimited pages)
www.freesitemapgenerator.com
www.sitemapdoc.com (Limit pages to 500)
How to Add Site Map in Google Webmaster :
To add Site Map in Webmaster Tool follow these steps :
Step 1 :
Upload Sitemap (downloaded from sitemap generator site) to your server home / root directory (Mostly in public_html folder) by using Cpnael of your site or file transfer software like FileZilla.
Step 2 :
Access site map by visiting your site as http://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml to ensure that sitemap is uploaded correctly.
Step 3 :
Login to Google Webmaster and find Optimization > Sitemaps from the left side of Webmaster.
Enter your sitemap name e.g sitemap.xml and press “Add Sitemap” and Refresh page.
That’s it, your sitemap submitted succesfully. Now you can see in Sitemap page that how many pages you submit in site map. In initial state your sitemap is in pending. It takes 2 to 4 days to crawl and indexed all submitted pages. However you will see a report from your webmaster that how much pages are indexed by search engine.
Update your site map by repeating complete process after adding new pages in your site.
I have a small video tutorial for you which help tu understand how to create and submit sitemap practically.
