What is a XML Sitemap and how do I create one?

Many people come to us and say we haven’t been provided with some of the fundamental basics when it comes to website design and we usually find ourselves saying the same thing over again – which is fine as we are here to help!.

Today I will go through with you how to create a XML Site map even if you don’t have much website coding knowledge.

If you go onto this link Site Map Generator you can see its not very difficult at all.

First of all we will need to type in the domain you want the site map for so for example I am going to use http://www.websitefacility.co.uk

The frequency doesn’t need to change so you can just leave it on none.

If you are not going to update your website that often then I would suggest leaving the last modification to none however if its a bigger company then personally I would have a last updated feature. Its completely up to you and doesn’t affect it much.

The priority again isn’t a major factor of the site map so you can also leave this as none.

So now you just simply press start and this is where the online site map generator will do all the hard work, It will go through your domain for you and find every html page and put it all into one list unfortunately you can only have a maximum of 500 pages however this isn’t really much of a problem because Google will still index your pages it just might not be as quick.

You will then be given a sitemap.xml file but what do i do with this?

Well you will need to upload this onto your server using a FTP (File transfer protocol), simply just place it on top next to the images and other folders. Google will then pick this up and go through it and start crawling those pages which will get indexed bringing your relevant pages up on Google.

I hope you understand this and if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us and we will do our best to help you.