So last week we cleaned up our error log and created a robot.txt to prevent the majority of error messages in the error log. This week our focus is going to be on creating a sitemap that we can then submit to Google, Yahoo or MSN.

There are several sitemap generators out but for the purpose of our project we will use xml-sitemaps.com’s generator to create a free sitemap.xml file. The free version does your top level links and they have a paid version which will include your whole site. Generating your sitemap is pretty easy…

1. Enter your domain in the appropriate box.
2. Set how often your pages are updated (there is no advantage to doing it more often if you don’t update frequently).
3. When you last modified your site content.
4. The priority of your pages in relation to each other (leave this as the default for now).
5. Click Start and wait for the output.

Once the output is provided scroll to the bottom where it says XML Sitemap content and copy that content to notepad (or your favorite text editor). At this point I would suggest you go through adjust the priority of pages like your index to be weighted higher (set it to 1.0). Once you have done that save your page as sitemap.xml and FTP it to your public_html folder.

Now that you have a basic sitemap you can go and submit it to various places. Stop number one is to submit it to Google through their webmaster tools. If you have not setup an account with them do so now. You can also submit your sitemap to Yahoo and MSN.

Lastly using the robots.txt file we setup last week we will add the following line…

Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.ca/sitemap.xml

Replace your domain above as it is just an example. You should do the same for all your subdomains as well to ensure maximum exposure for your sites pages.

If you get stuck let me know in the comments.