How to create xml sitemap for websites?

In last post, we read about  sitemap in a website – html sitemap and xml sitemap. Now, we will know about xml sitemap in detail, how to create xml sitemap for any website.

XML sitemap created for search engines, it is basically listing of all website urls that we want to index by search engines. XML sitemaps also provides pages modification information. XML sitemaps are very helpful in crawling the websites. XML sitemap can be submitted to search engines for crawling. Like for Google, sitemap can be submitted by Google webmaster tool.

If you still don’t know about sitemaps then please visit what is sitemap in website?

For 6-10 page website, we can create xml sitemap by hand written code – (Please see xml sitemap Structure).

XML sitemap example –

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

  <url>
    <loc>http://ecomspark.com/html5-forms-input-types/</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-08-17 06:52</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>50%</priority>
  </url>

  <url>
    <loc>http://ecomspark.com/html5-semantics-elements-html5-tutorial-part-2/</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-08-07 18:36</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>40%</priority>
  </url>
  <url>

</urlset>

But for the website with multiple pages , we can use online xml sitemap generator like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ . Its very easy to use these softwares, just enter your website url and do some basic settings and click start. It will generate  xml sitemap for your website with following –

• It will create  an XML sitemap that can be submitted to Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines to help them crawl your website better.
• It will create a Text sitemap to have a plain list of all your pages.
• It will create a ROR sitemap, which is an independant XML format for any search engine.
• It will enerate an HTML site map to allow human visitors to easily navigate on your site.

But this online xml sitemap generators have page limitation  up to 500 pages only. We can also buy Pro version for more than 500 pages.

If you have a dynamic website that updates frequently then you can ask any developer to write any script to create dynamic XML sitemap that will update frequently.

There are many ways to create XML sitemap that will also depend on which web platform you are using. In next post, we will discuss how to create XML sitemap in word press websites.

Please comment for any suggestion and feedback. Thanks .