Sitemap index file must be UTF-8 encoded.

A single Sitemap file cannot list more than 50,000 URLs and must be no larger than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes) when uncompressed.

If you want to include more URLs or If you do provide multiple Sitemaps use a “Sitemap index” file ( as http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml). A Sitemap index file can list up to 50,000 Sitemaps.

Do not include session IDs in URLs.

Do not include direct image URLs in Sitemaps

The XML format of a Sitemap index file is very similar to the XML format of a Sitemap file. The Sitemap index file must:

<sitemapindex> – the parent tag surrounds the file.
<sitemap> – the parent tag for each Sitemap listed in the file (a child of <sitemapindex>)
<loc> – the location of the sitemap (a child of <sitemap>)
<lastmod> – the last modified date of the sitemap (optional)

The Sample XML Sitemap Index

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <sitemapindex xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap1.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2004-10-01T18:23:17+00:00</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
   <sitemap>
      <loc>http://www.example.com/sitemap2.xml.gz</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
   </sitemap>
   </sitemapindex>

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