To avoid confusion, I’m going to quickly explain the difference between an HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap.

Explanation Of HTML Sitemaps

HTML sitemaps are simple lists of links that visitors to a site can use to explore all of the site’s pages. It looks something like this:

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A person can go to my sitemap and find all of my posts organized into categories. Google and other search engines use HTML sitemaps as a resource to find all of your pages. They do this by following all the links to discover each page. This means that as long as all of your pages and posts are on your HTML sitemap Google will be able to find them, assuming you linked to your sitemap from your homepage and your homepage is in Google’s index.

Explanation Of XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps have nothing to do with the visitors on your site, in fact visitors to your site will never see your XML sitemap. The sole purpose of an XML sitemap is to give search engines a comprehensive list of all the URLs (web pages) in your site. In theory, the natural link structure of your site should lead search engines to all of your pages. However, using an XML sitemap is a good fall back in case Google has a problem loading any of your pages the first time around.

XML sitemaps look something like this:

<urlset>
<url>
<loc>http://courtneytuttle.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2007-08-15T17:33:10+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>
http://courtneytuttle.com/2007/02/25/starting-a-blog-in-5263-words/
</loc>
<lastmod>2007-08-15T11:33:10+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

As you can see, XML sitemaps are basically code that really can’t be read by your normal visitors. If you’re interested in seeing what a full XML sitemap looks like, you can find mine here: Court’s XML Sitemap.

Creating An XML Sitemap For WordPressers

This is where the WordPress users are going to be really happy. There is a simple WordPress plugin that will create the entire sitemap for you. You can find the plugin here: Google Sitemaps. To install it, you can follow these simple steps:

• Download the plugin.
• Extract the plugin. You can extract it by right-clicking your mouse on the downloaded file and selecting ‘Extract’ or ‘Extract All’. You’ll have to click ‘next’ a few times.
• Upload the plugin to the wp-content/plugins folder on your web server. I created special instructions for doing this via FTP here: How To FTP Using FileZilla.
• Activate the plugin by logging into your WordPress admin, going to ‘Plugins’, finding the ‘Google Sitemaps’ plugin, and clicking ‘Activate’ next to it.

Configuring The Plugin

To configure the plugin, login to your WordPress admin, go to ‘Options’ and click ‘Sitemaps’. I left almost everything how it is with the exception of the ‘Change frequencies’ and ‘Priorities’ sections. Here’s a screen shot of how I configured those sections:

Creating An XML Sitemap For Non-WordPressers

Unfortunately this is going to be a pretty big hassle if you don’t have a WordPress blog. You will have to create yours manually using Notepad. Paste this template into Notepad and save the file as ’sitemap.xml’:

<urlset>
<url>
<loc>http://yoururl.com</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

You will have to manually add in each URL in your site. As you can see by looking at the code you will need to add in approximately how often each URL will change, and how important (priority) it is on your site. Your most important page should be set to 1 and your least important should be set to .1. Middle of the road pages will be set to .5 and so on.

This will be pretty time consuming because you need to create a <url> section for each page. An XML sitemap that shows two pages would look like this:

<urlset>
<url>
<loc>http://yoururl.com</loc>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>1</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://yoururl.com/second-page-url/</loc>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>.1</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Submitting Your Sitemap To Google

To get your XML sitemap into Google, you will need to create an account with Google Webmaster Tools. I would recommend doing it, but not until after your site gets indexed by Google. If you don’t know if you’re indexed, visit this one from the archives: Search Engine Rankings - Where Do You Stand?

Once you get your account, you will login and go to ‘Webmaster Tools’. You will then be prompted to add your site. Add in your site in the following format: http://yoururl.com. They are then going to have you verify that you own the site. After you’ve done that, you will be able to click on the site where it shows this: Manage: http://yoururl.com. You will be taken to a screen where you will find a ‘Sitemaps’ link. You will then find an ‘add a sitemap’ link.

You will then give Google the URL of your sitemap. If you are using the WordPress plugin the URL will be: http://yoururl.com/sitemap.xml. If you created your own you will type the URL where you placed it. That’s it, you’re in!

There is no need to resubmit the sitemap, Google will check back for new versions.