XML Sitemap Generator - XML Sitemaps Tutorial

Note: We have a video tutorial:

We are using our A1 Sitemap Generator software for creating website XML sitemaps. Although there are many built-in sitemap tools and configuration options available, you can usually generate XML sitemaps without adjusting any of them.

Creating XML sitemaps helps both you and search engines:

• Makes it easier for search engines to find all pages in your website.
• Enables search engines to quickly refresh and index changed pages.

Firstly, before generating any XML sitemap, you need to crawl the website to locate all pages. A1 Sitemap Generator supports nofollow and noindex meta tags, user login and lots of other crawling related options. For far the most websites, you can just use defaults. All you need is to type the website root path and let A1 Sitemap Generator start crawling!

When the website scanning has finished, all pages found are shown outlined explorer like. You can easily see page details including information about outgoing and incoming links. You can even check pages for CSS and HTML errors. When all done, click the Create sitemap tab.



For a more comprehensive website analysis and link checker tool, see A1 Website Analyzer.

Pick XML sitemap in the drop down box and click Build selected. With standard configuration, this generates an XML sitemap with priority etc. values set for all pages. It will also automatically split the sitemap file into multiple files if necessary.

Immediately after generating the XML sitemap, you can view the XML generated for the sitemap files. If your website was so large A1 Sitemap Generator needed to split the sitemap into multiple files, the files are usually named sitemap-index.xml, sitemap.xml, sitemap-1.xml, sitemap.xml-2 etc.

All you need now is upload XML sitemap, submit XML sitemap and optionally ping XML sitemap once in a while.

• All urls have to be fully specified including the protocol part, e.g. http://.
• Each generated XML file can maximum contain 50,000 urls. However you can have multiple XML sitemap files.
• If you have multiple XML sitemap files, you can connect them with a XML sitemap index file.
• You can name the xml sitemap files what you want, but they must all use UTF-8 encoding.
• Each url in XML sitemaps have following fields:
  • Location : The location of the url, e.g. http://www.example.com.
  • Last modified : When was the content last changed, e.g. 2007-01-01.
  • Change frequency : How often is the content changed, e.g. weekly.
  • Priority : How important is the page content, e.g. 1.0.

A1 Sitemap Generator offers a wide range of tools and options to make sure XML sitemaps generated are the best possible. One example of this that is enabled by default, is the automatic calculation of XML sitemap priorities for all URLs based on internal linking in the website.

Historical overview of Google sitemaps and XML sitemaps protocol:

• 2005: Google created XML sitemaps specification. Commonly referred to as Google sitemaps.
• 2006: Yahoo and MSN / Bing joined and Google sitemaps got renamed to sitemaps protocol.
• 2007: Ask (search engine) and IBM announced support for sitemaps protocol.