One of the good tips for website SEO includes creating a sitemap for your website. This is basically an xml file that contains a list of the URLs within your website. By having a sitemap file can assist search engines like google with knowing what urls exist for your website that they may not otherwise pickup.
If you have a relatively small website with a handful of pages then you can probably create your sitemap manually. However if you have a medium to large website then building a sitemap by hand is not practical. I use different CMS’s for my websites and many popular CMS’s (wordpress, Joomla, etc) have plugins or extensions that can create a sitemap for you. However, I wanted a sitemap builder that was not limited to the content management software that I am using.
After some googling I came across this website, http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. It is a web-based free sitemap generator. It’s very user friendly and generates a sitemap from the base URL that you specify. It can even export it as a compressed file (sitemap.xml.gz).
The free version has a limit of 500 URL’s I believe, however you are able to purchase the software to install on your own webserver. I was so happy with the results of the free version that I purchased the full version which has unlimited crawling and additional configurations such as generation of a mobile sitemap.
Now I have my own sitemap generator on my webserver and I am not limited to the CMS I am using. I simply let google know about my sitemap by using the Google Webmaster tools. The XML generator also submits your sitemap to the major search engines as well.
There are many free XML generators available, but I highly recommend this one.
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