How to Create XML Sitemap Using Sitemap Generator Tool
A Sitemap is a file that contains all of your website pages, attachments, posts etc. It informs Google and other Major Search Engines that the available URLs of your pages are ready to crawl. This way GoogleBot ar BingBot crawl your entire site. Sitemap can be stored as either HTML or XML format. But most of the Search Engines recommend XML version of Sitemap. If you are using any SEO plugin, then you can get the Sitemap easily or else you can easily create XML Sitemap Using Sitemap Generator Tool.
The XML Sitemap also specifies additional information related to the pages that you listed in your Sitemap, such as:
- When the page was last updated.
- How often the site changes.
- The importance of the page that is respective to other URLs.
A Sitemap doesn’t contain only page URLs but also contains attachments, posts, tags, categories etc. Here is an example of my site’s Sitemap.
In this above picture, I have shown XML Sitemap of my site. It contains post, page, attachment and category sitemap that I have set on Yoast SEO. You also need to submit blog Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools. In this tutorial, We will share How to Create XML Sitemap Using Official Sitemap Generator Tool.
How to Create XML Sitemap
Creating XML Sitemap is very easy. If you are using any SEO plugin, you can easily get the Sitemap link. We use Yoast SEO plugin for Sitemap. If you didn’t get your Sitemap, then do the following steps:
Step 1, First login to your WordPress dashboard. Then go to SEO> XML Sitemaps. If you newly installed Yoast SEO plugin, then you probably can’t see the options.
In case this happens, go to SEO> Dashboard. From there, go to Features and enable Advanced Settings Pages. After clicking on save changes, you can see XML Sitemaps options.
Step 2, Now go to SEO> XML Sitemaps and enable XML Sitemap functionality. You can find your XML Sitemap there and also enable/ disable any options as your need. To get your XML Sitemap URL, click on XML Sitemap link that I have shown in the following picture.
Step 3, After clicking your sitemap link, you can see your Sitemap that looks like (yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml). Now you can submit XML Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.
Create XML Sitemap Using Google Sitemaps Plugin
If you are using WordPress, then you can create XML Sitemap by using a WordPress Plugin, called Google XML Sitemaps.
This plugin allows you to create XML Sitemap for your site that you can submit it to Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. To install this plugin, search for Google XML Sitemaps and install it. After activating it, go to Settings> XML-Sitemap. You can find your Sitemap link at top of the page.
You can also enable/ disable any option from the plugin settings. But we recommend to leave it as default.
Create XML Sitemap Using Sitemap Generator Tool
In case you are not using WordPress, then you need to manually create Sitemap using Sitemap Generator Tool. To create manually, go to xml-sitemaps.
You need to add the following:
- Your website URL.
- Specify how often you make any changes in your site.
- Identify the last modification date that you modified.
- Choose the priority that a particular URL relative to other pages on the same site.
When you provided that information, now click on Start to create Sitemap. But total 500 pages will be indexed in Sitemap. If you want to index more than 500 pages, then you need to get the Standalone version of XML-Sitemap generator.
After creating your Sitemap, you need to download XML version of Sitemap.
Download the XML Sitemap file and upload it into the domain root folder of your site. Then submit XML Sitemap to Google Webmasters Tools.
Other XML Sitemap Generator Tools,
- A1 Sitemap Generator (can index over 100.000 URLs) Recomended
- web-site-map (can index more than 4000 pages)
- freesitemapgenerator (can index up to 5000 pages)
- seotoolstation (can index upto 5000 pages)
Conclusion
Sitemap is necessary if you are a site owner. A sitemap contains all of your website pages, attachments, posts links and it helps Search Engines to crawl your pages quickly. So your contents will be shown on Search Engine Results on a search query. Without a Sitemap, this is not possible. For example, you have a blog that has 10 posts, 5 images, and 3 pages. So in Sitemap, those links will be listed automatically. Then you need to submit XML Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools as well. And your website content will be visible on Search Engine Results by a related keyword search query.
I hope this tutorial helped you to understand the basics of a Sitemap and create XML Sitemap using Sitemap Generator tool. If you have any problem to create XML Sitemap or related Sitemap Generator, don’t hesitate to let us know. If you have any suggestion or any opinion, drop a comment below. You can connect us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+
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