How to Make a Site Map Freely in the Easiest and Quickest Way

Before we talk about how to make a site map, we need first figure out why major search engines, like Google encourage webmasters to build a site map.

 

Why is Site Map Necessary?

 

Site map is designed for guiding people to the exact page they are looking for, and assisting search engine bots in finding and indexing all pages listed on the map.

Site maps are especially necessary for these sites (with indexing problems):

 

A new site with few back links (crawlers discover pages by following links from one page to another, therefore, if a site is not well linked, crawlers may "ignore" it)
A site having numerous dynamic pages (crawlers usually "skipping" dynamic content)
A site frequently updated (such as blog, forum, and message board)
A hierarchical site with quite a lot of content pages that are not well linked, or not linked at all (this will greatly affect the user experience and search engine crawling as well)
A site including pages that are not easily found through normal crawl process (for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images)

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How to Make a Site Map?

 

There are mainly two types of sitemap—HTML sitemap (for user guidance) and XML sitemap (for search engine indexing). Below are templates for each type, you will know how to make a site map by following these templates below:

HTML (here gives a simple tree style template that matches the underlying website structure):

Vision Style

Code

Directory A Page A Page B Directory B Page C Page D

<A href="http://www.example.com/DirectoryA.html"> Directory A </A> <BR> <A href="http://www.example.com/DirectoryA/PageA.html"> Page A </A><BR> <A href="http://www.example.com/DirectoryA/PageB.html"> Page B </A><BR> <A href="http://www.example.com/Directory B.html"> Directory B </A><BR> <A href="http://www.example.com/DirectoryB/PageC.html"> Page C </A><BR> <A href="http://www.example.com/DirectoryB/PageD.html"> Page D </A><BR>

XML (with one URL):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"> <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/?id=who</loc> <lastmod>2011-12-12</lastmod> <changefreq>monthly</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url> </urlset>

You can certainly create your sitemap manually: open a new file in a plain-text editor or Dream Weaver, and add the information of every page to this file by following the above templates. But if your site has a large number of pages, this would be rather time-consuming. And it is quite likely that some pages will be omitted or you will make mistakes in editing the information about each page during sitemap building. What's more, every time there are new contents added to your site, you have to recreate a new one.

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Any Easier and Quicker Way?

 

After you knew the disadvantages of manually creating sitemap, you may be more interested in how to make a sitemap in an easier and quicker way.

 

SiteMap X is an auto sitemap generator which can create complete, valid sitemaps in up to one minute. You need not to do the back-breaking and meticulous work yourself. Enter the URL of your website and fill the required fields in the settings, then you can wait for it to generate different types of sitemaps according to your needs.

 

In addition, it is not only a sitemap generator, but also:
Sitemap Uploader. After creating sitemaps, SiteMap X will automatically upload them to your favorite FTP server. Or you can use the built-in FTP Client to manually submit your sitemaps at any time. What's more, you can also just set a schedule and let SiteMap X automatically generate the sitemaps and upload them to your own site.

Search Engine Pinger. SiteMap X can immediately ping search engines after you uploaded or updated your sitemaps. It will also notify search engines if any change has been made in your web pages. This function will quicken the indexing speed and help your site obtain better freshness and coverage.

 

What's more, it is totally free and fully functional! How to make a sitemap in the easiest, quickest and cheapest way?—download SiteMap X right now!

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