Sitemaps are useful for giving information about your website and the important URLs in your site to a search engine such as Google. Sitemaps are in fact more useful if your website has dynamic content or other content which cannot be discovered easily by a search engine crawler, or if your website is new or it does not have many web-links to it. Submitting a sitemap of your site to a search engine or keeping it ready in your website at the proper location will help the search engines to crawl the important pages in your site properly and to index your site properly in the search index. You can prepare a free sitemap of your site by using free online service offered by XML-Sitemap.
This site will prepare a free sitemap for your site for upto 500 pages in your site. If you want to prepare a sitemap for a much bigger site, XML-Sitemap offers an Unlimited Sitemap Generator for a small amount, which can generate sitemaps for bigger sites, by dividing sitemap in parts if needed, as per the guidelines for preparing sitemap.
For using the free service, go to the XML-Sitemap, and enter the starting URL of your site (typically your home page) and select other relevant options and then click on Start button. Your sitemap will be prepared within minutes depending upon the size of your site. You can then easily download this sitemap file for keeping it on your website and/or submitting it to search engines directly.
It is pertinent to point out that the Sitemap Protocol 0.9 presently defines the format for the sitemap. This protocol is defined by sitemaps.org and this protocol is now followed by the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, etc. As per this protocol, the sitemap is to be prepared in XML format. The Sitemaps should not be larger than 10MB in size and can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs. If your site contains more than 50,000 URLs or if your sitemap is bigger than 10MB in size, you’ll have to create multiple sitemap files and use a sitemap index file. A sitemap index file is permitted to have up to 1,000 sitemaps and it itself must not exceed 10MB in size. However, you can use gzip to compress your sitemaps to keep its size within limits.
Once you have prepared the sitemap for your site, you can keep this sitemap.xml file in your website preferably at the root of your domain, so that its address could be something like: “http://www.your-domain.com/sitemap.xml”.
Information about where your sitemap.xml file is kept should be mentioned in the robot.txt file of your domain, so that the crawlers of search engines could easily find it by looking at the robot.txt file. The relevant entry in the robot.txt file should be something like this (replace it by the actual path of your sitemap file):
Sitemap: http://www.your-domain.com/sitemap.xml
You can also submit your sitemap file directly to a search engine. For example, it can be submitted to Google at this address, which may require signing in to Google Webmaster Tools, a free service offered by Google to website owners for better linking of their website.
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