Welcome to the sitemap tutorial that has solely been created to help your find your way around creation and validation of sitemaps for your website. It gets better, if you currently don’t have a website, sign up here for a 14 day trial of our sitemap generator that will help you plan your new website.

Before we proceed further, especially on the step-by-step guide on how to generate sitemaps, below is some general information about sitemaps for you.

Sitemap Defined

This tutorial is based on sitemap protocol 0.9 that was released by SiteMaps.org that is standard, validated and used by all major search engines like Google.

Well, a sitemap enables you to generate a file that is hosted among other files in your account to notify the search engines about all the pages contained in your website. In short, it avails complete information regarding your site’s content to the search engines.

In as much as sitemaps are primarily used to boost your website’s indexing process by search engines, they can also offer accessibility to some pages. If you like, a number of pages that cannot be accessed through the menus can still be indexed by the search engines.

Sitemaps don’t alter the usual way your pages are indexed by crawler bots but only broaden your content’s visibility and accessibility.

Note; just by having a sitemap on your website is not a guarantee that all pages will be indexed and added to the search engines. Furthermore, sitemaps have no effect on your page rank, and therefore, shouldn’t be treated as an SEO tool.

This sitemap tutorial looks into the following topics;

• Sitemap Format - For information on the default sitemap format and how different tags in the XML are used, visit this section for more.  

• What does a XML sitemap look like? - It is in this section that you will encounter a simple sample sitemap. You can use the example provided as a base for your own website’s sitemap.

• How to have multiple Sitemaps and Sitemap index - Learn about some limitations and how to add a big number of URLs in a sitemap in this section.

• Sitemap Validation - Get information on sitemap validation for your site in this section. You can use a sitemap creator to validate the sitemap.

To ensure that we maintain very high standards especially in our offering of world-class feature-rich hosting packages, our team will constantly update the information contained herein to make it more accurate and useful as you seek to create your sitemap, whether you do it manually or with the aid of a sitemap creator. In fact, sitemap generators will save you the pain of understanding the rather complex process.