Traditional sitemaps with their endless list of pages are less common these days as search has become the main way for people to find what they are looking for. It is now much more important to ensure that your content is searchable and listed on all the major search engines.

XML sitemaps were conceived by Google as a way for website owners to easily provide large lists of website content with key metadata about the content. Since their original invention they have become an international standard which has been adopted by many of today’s major search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, Yandex and more.

So what is an XML sitemap? Well in simple terms it is a structured computer readable file format with a list of all the pages in your website. Alongside your pages it contains details about when your pages were last modified, how often they are updated (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) and how important each page is are relative to others. The simple structured format enables you to provide search engines with detailed information about your website to ensure they are fully up to date.

Websites large and small will find use for XML sitemaps and will enable webmasters to very quickly and easily update the major search engines of changes to your website and its content to ensure it can be indexed quickly and correctly. This is usually a huge benefit for newer websites and blogs when their natural discoverability of the site is low due to low numbers of inbound links, etc.

It’s possible to create a sitemap using a variety of tools and methods, but probably the easiest way to get started is to use an online XML Sitemap Generator to get you started. Usually online sitemap generators will give you a number of options to configure your sitemap and then index your website to create a sitemap. You can then download your sitemap in a number of formats ready for uploading to your website.

Webmasters who have large websites / blogs and use platforms such as WordPress will be better off using a plugin that integrates directly with their content management system. A plugin will allow you to automatically and dynamically generate a sitemap so that it is always up to date when you add new content.

Many of these tools are freely available and even open source. There are services which you could pay for, but as many of the free services are very mature and well supported it usually isn’t worth your while.

No matter how you generate an XML sitemap for your website, it is very important you keep your website/blog content relevant, up-to-date and changing. When you update your website always ensure you notify search engines of the changes you have made to ensure your website content remains fresh, current and indexed. With many free sitemap generators available they provide and excellent way keeping search engines up to date. xmlsitemapgenerator.org/free-online-sitemap-generator.aspx