How To Create Your Sitemap Online
Before you create your Sitemap online, you should first know what a Sitemap is and why its important. Sitemaps were first created some time ago to let your web surfers find all of the pages that you include on your site. It was almost like an almanac that directed your browsers to all of the destinations on your site, hence the name: Sitemaps. However as time went on, it wasn’t necessary to create your Sitemap online for the purpose of your directing your users to places on the site, rather in 2005, Google developed an XML Sitemap format that helps search engines find data on your webpage more effectively.
Sitemaps became a necessity for Google web crawlers, because the complexities of websites continued to grow and with the popularity of blogs and the extensiveness of catalogues, businesses began updating their webpages daily, and Sitemaps were needed to keep up with the updates. If you don’t create your Sitemap online, you may be left in the dust in the search results.
Create Your Sitemap Online | What About Other Search Engines?
Fortunately if you create your Sitemap online with the Google XML format, you will be able to use this across the board with search engines such as Yahoo and Microsoft search engines. This is because in an effort to encourage other search engines to use the same format, Google released its format under the Attribution/Share Alike Creative Commons license, which was a huge relief for business owners.
No longer will you need to create your Sitemap online in different formats for different search engines, this is going to save your company a lot of time and money.
Create Your Sitemap Online | What About SEO?
If you create your Sitemap online, it will not exactly increase your SEO presence, rather its purpose is to help search engines to make more accurate rankings in terms of the content of your site, because it makes it much easier to read. It puts all of your information in a tightly wrapped package and this helps out the search engines, because it helps them to save time when they are plowing through millions of other websites looking for relevant content.
Before this XML format was used, often times search engines would misjudge a page’s content and even after a webmaster’s careful crafting, the site would not end up in a search with the desired keywords. But now, it is possible to create your Sitemap online and share it with all search engines, by placing it into your robot’s text file, for example:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
Create Your Sitemap Online | Lets Do It!
I would recommend visiting XML-Sitemaps and using their free online Sitemap generator to create your Sitemap online. Here are 4 simple steps to create your sitemap online:
- Enter your full website URL and some optional parameters in the form below.
- Press ‘Start’ button and wait until the site is completely crawled.
- You will be redirected to the generated sitemap details page, including number of pages, broken links list, XML file content and link to a sitemap file. Download the sitemap file using that link and put it into the domain root folder of your site.
- Go to your Google Webmaster account and add your sitemap URL.
You can also learn more about Sitemaps by following this link. Its simple to create, all you need to do is follow the steps on the webpage to create your Sitemap online. Don’t worry it doesn’t take an expert to do it, and it is a great investment of your time, as it helps all search engines to better categorize and rate your content with their algorithms.