While browsing through the quicklist of how to optimize your site to attract more visitors from search engines also know as (SEO), I stumbled upon a quicky and definitely a must. Creating a Sitemap literally takes less than a minute and helps your site be more google-friendly as soon as it’s indexed again. Thus I have compiled a great tutorial on how to make a sitemap.

Basically what it does is make the site easier to read for the Google Spider Bot that will occasionally scan your pages to add it to it’s search rankings. By making it easier to read, it develops a higher priority on the search engine and will have more results appear for more of the keywords on your site.

Here’s a quick guide on how to make a Sitemap for your own blog.

If You Use Wordpress

1. Download the plugin “Google XML Sitemaps Generator” and upload it to your wp-content/plugin folder and activate it through wordpress.

2. In Wordpress go to the Options tab and click on the newly formed sub-tab called “Sitemap.”

3. Click on “Rebuild Sitemap” and it will generate a .xml and .xml.gz sitemap file in the root of your Wordpress directory.

4. 5. Go to your Google Webmaster’s account and specify the url of the sitemap. If you installed it in your public html folder it would most likely be (www.yourdomainname.com/Sitemap.xml) with the exception of the .com being whatever subnet you use. Next time Google tries to index your page it will also spy on the sitemap and therefore more efficiently integrate your site into it’s search rankings.

*What’s nice about the wordpress method is that the plugin notifies Google, Msn, and the Yahoo search engines that you’ve updated your sitemap.

If You Don’t Use Wordpress

1. Go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and enter in your domain name and the site will scan your domain and all of it’s pages and sub-directories.

2. Once done it will go to a page where you can download your finished sitemap in a variety of formats. I personally used an uncompressed xml file, but you can choose a different file type depending on your situation.

3. Go to your host and access the root folder of your site and then click on public html. If you do not have a public html folder check to see if you have a www folder as the later has been created to simplify things for newer Internet-users who may otherwise have been confused.

4. Upload your sitemap to the Public Html folder (or the WWW).

5. Go to your Google Webmaster’s account and specify the url of the sitemap. If you installed it in your public html folder it would most likely be (www.yourdomainname.com/Sitemap.xml) with the exception of the .com being whatever subnet you use. Next time Google tries to index your page it will also spy on the sitemap and therefore more efficiently integrate your site into it’s search rankings.

If your interested in SEO you may also like my post, SEO Through Site Organization, for quick and easy ways to get your site ranked more and higher on search engines

This is the first of many small tips and guides to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) I will be posting so please subscribe to be the first to know when I release a new article. Feel free to comment on anything you think I did wrong or should do better so I can better adapt my future posts to your needs.