Create A Sitemap For Your Website Using a free 3rd Party Website
January 03, 2013
Google recommends submitting a Sitemap for your website.
A Sitemap is a map of your "website".
Map of San Francisco, CA Sitemap of my website
A sitemap is supposed to help Google find every page of your website and increase visibility, especially for websites with a lot of pages. You can also submit your website to other search engines.
This post is how I created a Sitemap using a 3rd party free website. Following these instructions may help your website gain visibility. I've known that sitemaps were important for a long time....but was scared. It seemed too advanced for a webmaster novice like myself, but using Google Webmaster Tools (now called Google Search Console) gave me the insight and instructions I needed. (The next post is how to submit your Sitemap to Google.)
Consider reading the previous post if your website is more of a template type hosted by a web service. Most likely they will help you create the Sitemap. It will be easier than these instructions.
Step by step, this is how I created and submitted a Sitemap for my website. You can too!
First read all the Sitemap tutorials on Google.
The page Creating Sitemaps has links to a number of free third-party tools that can help you generate a Sitemap. (I thought creating a Sitemap on my own was just too much for my inexperience.)
I tried two different websites for making my sitemap. It seemed a little scary to try this for the first time.....but taking a risk is what it takes to survive as a "Webmaster of your own Domain".
FreeSiteMapGenerator
(This site was used for the tutorial in this post.)
xml-sitemaps.com
I tested both sites and saw no significant difference in the results between the two sitemaps generators. xml-sitemaps.com was faster.
Create an account with Free Site Map Generator and enter the URL of your site. I came back the next day and a Sitemap for my website was done.
- DOWNLOAD the SiteMap
- SAVE to your computer
- UPLOAD to your website using your FTP (FileTransferProtocal) service.
Now I am ready to submit my sitemap address to Google. (This is the next post. )
This post was updated on July 28, 2022, to provide current links.