What is a XML sitemap?

What is a XML Sitemaps?

XML Site maps are documents that assist Google, Bing, and other search engines to understand a website’s content while looking through it for information users are looking for. Sitemaps are protocols that give the webmaster of a website the ability to inform search engines about the links of a website that can be viewed. Sitemaps give the permission to find every webpage to the engine that could otherwise be missed while indexing it.

Why do we need a XML sitemap?

The XML sitemap is very useful because it has the feature of specifying additional data about every URL in the site such as”

• The last time it was updated.
• The frequency of site changes.
• The importance of a page compared to other pages on the same site.

XML Document embodies all these information, thus helps the search engines to understand what the website’s content is about and search through it more precisely. A sitemap is an inclusion protocol.

How to create a XML sitemap?

Creating a XML sitemap for a site is a very simple and straightforward procedure. DYNO Mapper is a free sitemap generator for a 14 day trial period. You can create free sitemaps online during the trial period or you can sign up for one of DYNO Mapper's paid plans. DYNO Mapper is great for XML sitemap creation but it also can great for producing HTML sitemaps for your website. DYNO Mapper will automatically crawl through your website and generate a sitemap. In addition, it is integrated with Google Analytics and content inventory and analysis tools.

Why use the DYNO Mapper sitemap generator?

DYNO Mapper is a great way to realize and display the real architecture of a website by using interactive visual site maps. It gives the user the ability to create sitemaps only by using the mouse. There are many reasons why DYNO Mapper is recommended rather than other sites. Some of the major reasons are:

1. Ability to create, edit, customize, and share sitemaps by using sitemap generator.
2. Integrate your sitemap with Google Analytics Integration.
3. Provides easy to use content inventory for your website’s content.
4. Comments. Discuss your sitemap and other people’s sitemaps with others and seek for ways to improve your sitemap.

How to upload a XML sitemap?

There are many search engines and explaining how to upload the XML sitemap to each of them would take a very long time. Thus, we will explain the main steps almost every major search engine requires in order to verify, accept, and use the sitemap of your site in future.

1. Create a new account on the search engine you want to submit your XML sitemap. It usually is a step that takes few minutes. In all cases, a password must be initialized to protect the account.
2. In the search engine site, navigate through the site to find where you can add the URL of your website and do it.
3. Provide the search engine with a site map to your site. The search engine will try to find the file and use it.
4. Verify that the site is yours. There are several ways by which verification can be done. The most used ones are:
   1. Download a verification file provided by the search engine, usually a small text. Store it into your site’s server. Google, for example, will allow you to download an .html file that you can put into your site. The file embodies a text that Google will look for to verify. As soon as it finds the text, verification is done.
   2. Use Meta tags to add to the homepage. They are special combination of characters the search engine will look for and recognize.
   3. Add a record, data or information, to the domain name DNS.
   4. Google Webmaster gives the permission to authenticate the ownership of the site by associating the site with Google Analytics Account.