How to create HTML and XML Sitemap (Site Map) for your website?

By Binu George On April 29, 2010 · 8 Comments · In Website Optimization

A site map or sitemap is a hierarchical representation of a Web site’s content that helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.
The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling.The sitemap can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site. Sitemap allows the users to navigate through the site to find the information.
There are different types of sitemaps
Related :

HTML Sitemaps
HTML sitemap primarily should focus on helping human visitors navigate your website.See globinch HTML sitemap.
There are plenty of tools available to create HTML sitemaps.

For WordPress there are many plug-ins available that automatically generates HTML sitemaps for your. Few such plug-ins are given below.

XML Sitemaps
XML sitemaps a or Google Sitemap is introduced by Google to help web developers can publish lists of links from across their sites. Now major search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask supports the Sitemaps protocol.
There are automated XML site map generators available and plenty of plugins are available for platforms like wordpress to generate sitemaps automatically. Few tools and plug-ins are given below

Normally the Robots.txt file can be used to identify sitemaps on the server as given below.

Sitemap: http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
or it can be in zipped form
Sitemap: http://yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.gz

There is another interesting web based tool WriteMaps that helps you quickly draw a diagrammatic represntation of your website.

Binu George , the author of Globinch.com, is a technology blogger and software architect. You can follow him on Twitter, Google+, Facebook. If you enjoyed reading the above article please consider sharing it.