Creating a site map should be your first job when finishing development or creating new pages.

There are generally two approaches to creating xml site maps, one option is to create you own from scratch and the other is to use an xml site map generator then edit the output before submitting. The latter is usually favored unless you are making a small change to the structure of your site.

Your typical site map will contain the internal linking structure of your site and will generally have 3 information tags , lastmod, changefreq and priority.

<lastmod> Is used to tell google when a page has been updated or modified in anyway.

<changefreq> Is used to give information to the spiders reguarding how often the page is updated. Daily,Weekly,Monthly.

<priority> Is used to inform the spiders of the most important pages of your site, navigation pages etc.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that site maps are old hat or think that they are to hard to create, because anything that may potentially speed up the amount of time it take for your site to be index is worth doing.

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Of course this is inefficient but we can solve this problem by helping google and other search engines to find our content with an XML sitemap. An XML sitemap can tell a search engine more information about a page such when it was last modified, how important the page is as well as how often it is updated. By providing this information to the search engines, they can crawl your site more efficiently, neither wasting their resources or yours.

Creating an XML sitemap is extremely simple. Here is an example:

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
                            http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">
    <url>
        <loc>http://www.redsauce.com/</loc>
        <lastmod>2009-11-04</lastmod>
        <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
        <priority>1</priority>
    </url>
</urlset>

For each individual page, you can specify the URL between the <loc></loc> tags, when the page was last updated between the <lastmod></lastmod> tags, how often the page is updated between the <changefreq></changefreq> tags and how important the page is between the <priority></priority> tags.

The priority of a page can be between 0.1 and 1; 1 being your most important page, e.g. your home page and the deeper you go into your site the less the priority score should be. By providing all this information, search engines can crawl your pages more intelligently without wasting your server’s resources.

Once you have finished creating your XML file, save it to the root of your server and name it sitemap.xml for example. You can let the search engines know it exists by adding this line to a robots.txt file (placed at the root of your domain):

Sitemap: http://www.redsauce.com/sitemap.xml

or by notifying google in webmaster tools about the location of your XML sitemap file.

An XML sitemap file can contain a maximum of 50,000 URLs and cannot exceed a maximum of 10MB file size. You can compress XML sitemap files to save your bandwidth but still mustn’t exceed 10MB once uncompressed.

You can write a script to create your sitemap from the pages on your site, or if your site doesn’t contain too many pages, you can use an online service such as xml-sitemaps.com to generate the sitemap file for you.

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