Generate A Sitemap For Fast Search Engine Indexing

A Sitemap is an XML file that inform search engines of your blog or website urls which you would like to be crawled or indexed. It will also contain brief information about each url such as title and descriptions. This will ensure your blog or website to be index much faster and more accurately.

Creating a sitemap is important as it forms a communication between your blog or website with the search engines. This helps especially if you use non-HTML linkages such as ajax, javascript or flash navigation.

Once your sitemap is ready, you can submit it to Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo SiteExplorer but for now lets look at how to create a sitemap.

For Wordpress blogs, this is done fairly easily and automatically by using the Google XML Sitemaps plugin which will notify all major search engines when your sitemap is updated by editing or creating a new post.

Blogspot blogs have it even easier since it is already built in. All you have to do is add atom.xml to your blogspot url. For example http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml and submit it.

As for websites, you can use the following free online sitemap generators:

Below 500 urls - XML-Sitemaps
Above 500 urls - AuditMyPC
Standalone Sitemap - GSitemap

If your website contains more than 50,000 pages, then you would have to split your sitemap up and then submit a sitemap index file. You can find more information about how to go about this at Google support page.