A Sitemap is a list of pages on your site accessible to visitors or search engines. The most popular use of the Sitemap is for Search Engine Optimization. It provides search engines a file that can be quickly scanned to find the pages of your site. This means that all of your pages have a better chance of being indexed. While there are different ways to make a Sitemap, the fastest is using a free online tool.

There are various websites online that offer a free Sitemap generator. For this example we will use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com for generating an XML Sitemap. After navigating to the website, fill in your website information and click Start:

sitemap1

While it's working it will show your website being scanned:

sitemap2

Once it is complete, you will have an .xml file that you can upload to your site:

sitemap3

Remember that the file will not be linked on your actual website. This Sitemap is just for search engines crawling your website. The search engine will crawl the .xml file and use it to help them index your site.

Once you have downloaded the .xml file, you will want to upload it into your document root. This will be your public_html folder if the Sitemap is for your primary domain. If it's for an Addon Domain, place it in the document root for that Addon domain (usually a folder under public_html with the same name as the Addon domain). To upload your Sitemap, access your cPanel File Manager or use an FTP client.

Once your Sitemap is uploaded, there are a couple of optional steps you can take to help speed up the process of seach engines finding your Sitemap. While these steps are not required, they may help speed up the process of search engines finding it.

If you make major changes to your site, you will want to generate a new sitemap. Simply repeat the steps outlined above.

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Comments

2013-05-09 2:45 am
Great information, Everyone should do this :)
n/a Points
2016-04-21 4:35 pm
Good info..tq:)
n/a Points
2019-02-22 8:24 pm

Ohhhhh Im in trouble... Please help.

My site is http://www.psykolog-nykøbing.dk

Soooo with special character "ø". What to do? it fails. Also tried replace ø with %C3%B8 but no luck. Really in a hurry as Im behind. Should ALL "ø" be replaced in ALL text in ALL files? Hope for ANY HELP! Thanks

Staff
619 Points
2019-02-23 3:20 am
It depends on where you are receiving the error. Your browser should automatically convert the character. However, in your website's code, you would need to use the proper encoding based on what the input expected is.
n/a Points
2020-02-04 3:59 pm

Very helpful information. I did it very easily.

 

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