How to Create A Sitemap

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By 1InternetSmarty
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Create A Sitemap

A sitemap is a simple page on your website or blog that reads like a table of contents. It is not complicated, but it will help with your search engine rankings. Google especially likes sitemaps. Here is how to make one.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Step 1

It helps if you can look at other sitemaps to get a feel for how they are created. You can see eHow's sitemap by looking at the navigation that runs across the bottom of their pages. Just click Article Sitemap and you will see how simple it is. It is a simple HTML or XML page that lists all of your website pages with each listing being hyper-linked to it's corresponding page. Your sitemap should be listed on the front page of your website at the very list. If you can list it on all of your pages this is even better.
Step 2

When you hyperlink your links in your sitemap, be consistent. Don't list some with www. and others without. List them all either:
http://www.Yoursite.com
OR
http://Yoursite.com
Don't use a combination of both. If you do Google will not pick up your sitemap information.
Step 3

A sitemap should not include more than 50,000 listings or URLs. If your site is larger than this, you will want to break your sitemap up into several sitemaps. In other words your sitemaps will need a sitemap. When sites get this large, you will need help to automate the process. Google lists several sitemap making tools here:
http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators

Comments

prism said

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on 4/11/2009 Great info! Sitemaps are so simple, yet still confusing to many people. Very helpful information to clear the mystery of making sitemaps. Thanks for sharing!