Creating sitemaps is important if you want your site to be indexed by search engines. If you want anyone to find your site on the internet through search engines like google, yahoo or MSN, then you need a sitemap.

A sitemap is basically a list all pages on your site, and other information about each page such as: when each page was modified, how often a page is modified, and how important the page is to the overall site.

Does your site need a site map?

If your site is new and you have no links or very few links pointing to it then yes you need a site map. Search engines follow links from one page to another to find your site and your web pages.

So if your site doesn’t have any links from other sites then it’s hard for search engines to find and index your site.

If your site is mature and has many links pointing to it, a sitemap may not be that helpful but it won’t hurt. If you have a lot of content pages and they aren’t linked well then a sitemap can be helpful.

How do you create a sitemap?
The best thing to do is create a sitemap that follows or adheres to sitemap.orgs protocol. This is used by all the major search engines: Yahoo, Good, and MSN.

You can create your sitemap manually or use an automated service to create your stemmap.

Creating Sitemaps Manually

The following is based on sitemaps.org protocol. which is the accepted format for Yahoo, Google and MSN and any other members of sitemaps.org.

  1. Create a new text file and name it with “.xml” extension. For example cbw-sitemap.xml
  2. Add the following 2 lines of code to the top to the file.
    <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

    <urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>

  3. Then add the url for each page of your site including the index or home page ..

    <url>

    <loc>http://www.yoursite.com/ </loc>
    <lastmod>2009-10-01 </lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly </changefreq >
    <priority>1.0 </priority>
    </url>

    For more details on the above xml tags visit sitemaps.org.

  4. Then add the closing urlset tag to the end of your file.

    </urlset>

  5. Save the file and upload the it to your site. Make a note of the url. Example: http://www.yoursite.com/your-sitemap.xml .

    Then submit the sitemap to each of the main search engines.