Any webmaster or internet businessman (internet marketer) should understand the important of the submission of an XML sitemap to each of the major search engines, doing so could effectively see pages indexed which would otherwise have never been stumbled upon by search engine crawlers. It should be noted that sitemaps based on anchor text, which you see on many websites, are not sitemaps as defined by Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask. If you haven't signed up to Google Webmaster Tools already then do so immediately, it really is important. The problem facing many small time webmasters is the difficulty in finding a decent free XML sitemap generator, many will promote themselves as free but will ultimately only map out a certain number of pages in their free versions before encouraging users to upgrade to an expensive paid version for a full site map.

This Hubpage will take a look at what I believe to be the best free online XML sitemap generator, once your XML sitemap has been completed and downloaded you should upload it manually to your websites database and then submit the relevant page URL to each of the major websites, for instructions on how to do so visit the Hubpage How To Submit Your XML Sitemap To Google, Bing, Yahoo & Ask (not yet written though, hyperlink coming soon). Why do this? It will instruct these search engines to crawl your pages, encouraging the indexing of more of your content. This can take several days but ultimately it will result in more of your pages indexing, it will also give the spiders a good idea about where to go next time it stumbles across your site. It is called a site map after all, consider it a map of your site to help the spiders know where to crawl.

Get A Free XML Sitemap

I have wasted many an hour downloading and installing desktop site map generators, or registering to browser based site map generators, only to find that they only map the first 500 pages of your site. They will probably be great for your brand new and largely undeveloped Wordpress blog or a micro-site, but I am shooting big with Excerptz.com and intend to far exceed 5000 pages; my latest sitemap has already found almost 2000 to map out. My problem has been answered, for now, by the website FreeSitemapGenerator.com which maps out up to 5000 pages for each of your websites, making it suitable for all but the largest of sites. It gets better too, as it allows you to log out as soon as you have requested the site map and then emails you to inform you when it has finished. Generally this will be a few hours later, subject to demand at the time of your request. Once you recieve the email you simply login to the site, download your xml sitemap, upload it to your database, and then submit the link to Google, Bing, Yahoo & Ask.

Author: Ryankett