The term Sitemap/site map is meant to help users or crawlers find the informations about your site.Simply ! in other words it lists all the pages of your sites. Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if the number of links is very large, the site map may be required so that search engines and visitors can access all content on the site.

There are mainly two types of sitemaps

1. HTML sitemaps :- listing all the pages of your site often by section. Check the example URL for more clear picture for how can arrange things in simple way.(eg: http://www.apple.com/sitemap/)
2. XML Sitemaps :- usually called Sitemaps, with a capital “S”. Mainly for give informations about your pages to the crawlers or search engines.

The second type(XML Sitemaps) we’ll be discussing in this article.

Step 1:-

Create a XML file named “sitemap.xml” and copy paste the following lines

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url><loc>/*your site pages*/</loc></url>
</urlset>

Step 2:-

Edit the line no:3 onwards as shown below. List all pages of your site in the tags.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url><loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html </loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/page1.html </loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/page2.html </loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/etc.html </loc></url>
</urlset>

Step:3 *optional

The optional tags are “<lastmod>, <changefreq>, <priority>“.
<lastmod> – The date of last modification of the file in YYYY-MM-DD format.
<changefreq> – How frequently the page is likely to change, valid values are:

1. always
2. hourly
3. daily
4. weekly
5. monthly
6. yearly
7. never

The value “always” should be used to describe documents that change each time they are accessed. The value “never” should be used to describe archived URLs.

<priority> – The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0. The default priority of a page is 0.5.
With the optional tags the xml looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url><loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html </loc>
<lastmod>2009-12-10</lastmod>
<changefreq>always</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url><loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/page1.html </loc></url>
<url><loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/page2.html </loc>
 <lastmod>2009-05-29</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
</url>
<url><loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/etc.html</loc></url>
</urlset>

Wowo !! How simply you created a sitemap. Next the final and most important step ie: submitting the Sitemaps files

Step :- 4

You can submit your Sitemaps file(s) in many ways.
for more information about the sitemaps file see the Sitemap-guidelines article too

First methond is Autodiscovery via robots.txt:

Add the Sitemap file to your robots.txt files.

User-agent: *
Disallow:
Sitemap: http://www.youdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Or the second method is Pings:

Several search engines have introduced a standardised support for Sitemap Pings. To submit your sitemap to a search engine (ping) use the following format:

http:// <search-engine-url >/ping?sitemap=http://www.youdomain.com/sitemap.xml

You will get a confirmation message from the search-engine-url if the submittion is valid.

Example:

Google.com
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.tutorboy.com/sitemap.xml
Yahoo.com
http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=http://www.tutorboy.com/sitemap.xml
Ask.com
http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.tutorboy.com/sitemap.xml
Moreover.com
http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.tutorboy.com/sitemap.xml
Bing.com(MSN)
http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.tutorboy.com/sitemap.xml