Lightburn

I was in the middle of creating a sitemap for a client when I realized how ridiculously easy, yet essential the procedure was. If you happen to have a website without a sitemap, your pages will still be crawled, but usually at a slower rate. Speed is everything when it comes to information on the web. When you have a sitemap, the crawler easily reads the map and knows exactly which pages to index for the search engine. There’s no guarantee that all pages in the map will be indexed, but it does lend a helping hand to the crawler and speeds up the process.

Show me the money!

In 5 simple steps, you can create and add a sitemap to your website. For my 55 second result, I used our website LightburnDesigns.com.

1. Go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com (FREE)
2. Enter your URL, select Change Frequency (monthly is a good bet) and set Priority to Automatic, click Start.
3. The website does all of the magic to create your sitemap. Time will vary depending on the size of your site; ours took about 20 seconds.
4. Download the un-compressed XML sitemap and upload it to the root folder of your site.
5. Sign into Google Webmaster Tools (you should be signed up for this if you own a website) and add your sitemap URL.

Nice job! Now take a break equal to the amount of time it took you to complete the sitemap. What a relaxing 55 seconds!

BONUS: Submit your sitemap to Bing.

1. Place your own sitemap location information in the bold text:
   http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?sitemap=www.YourSiteHere.com/sitemap.xml
2. Paste this URL into your browser’s address bar and press Enter.
3. You’re done.

Resources

• http://www.xml-sitemaps.com *Note: It’s only free for up to 500 pages.
• http://www.google.com/webmasters/ Google Webmaster Tools
• http://www.sitemaps.org/ Technical sitemap protocols.