How To Build A Sitemap For Your Internet Home Business

If you have just started a Internet Home Business then you may have heard of a XML Sitemap. You may also be wondering “What the heck is a sitemap?”

A sitemap is simply an index of all the pages on your website. Broadly speaking there are two kinds of sitemap. One is to help visitors to your website find their way around and the other is an XML file which helps Google and other search engines to register all the pages on your website more efficiently.

If your website is new, or if it has grown into a mega-site and lacks a clear architecture, or uses a lot of Flash or Ajax applications, and XML site map will ensure that all your pages can be quickly detected by Google and added to natural search listings.

If you are constantly updating different webpages a XML site map will ensure that your updates are more quickly indexed.

On the other hand, micro-niche sites that consist of just a few pages probably do not need to have an XML sitemap because they are easily searched by search engine spiders.

If you have no clue how to make an XML sitemap, don’t worry! There is a simple, free online sitemap generator at XML Sitemaps. This site will not only make a site map for your website but it will also check how many broken links there are on your website. However, if you want to follow up on that information you will have to pay to receive details of the locations of those links.

To produce a sitemap, simply click the “Free Online Sitemap Generator” link, enter your website URL in the appropriate field and choose the frequency with which you wish to have your XML site map updated. You will then have to set another couple of variables and hit the start button. The free version will index up to 500 pages for you. If your website has more than 500 pages you can pay to have an unlimited number listed on your XML site map, but for most websites the free version will be adequate.

You can watch the progress of the sitemap generation process in a new browser after clicking the button. In less than a minute the system will generate a site map for you and the HTML code which you can copy and paste into a notebook file and upload to your “public_html/” folder.

After you have done that, go to Google.com (google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/siteoverview) and either log in or set up a Webmasters account and add your site map URL.

The whole process of making a sitemap with the free online sitemap generator can be done in a matter of minutes and once you have done it you won’t need to do anything else. From now on you can be sure that your website will be comprehensively indexed by Google and the other search engines.


September 12, 2009  Tags: , , , ,   Posted in: Training

One Response

  1. Mike - September 16, 2009

    I like to use sitemaps for the major navigation pages or level 1 pages and 0 the landing page, or for the landing page for each top level category, as an xml sitemap

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