Putting a sitemap into my website?

I am curious how to do this. My site is mainly HTML and I made a sitemap but I am not sure how to put a sitemap into my site, I am fairly new at this, thanks for the help.

 

Is your sitemap for your site visitors or search engines ? Normally you just add a regular link to "Sitemap" in your footer. Most of my sitemaps are intended for search engines and I do not add the link to the site... I just upload them and submit them to the big 3 search engines thru their webmaster services.

 

How do I do this?

Im confused about sitemaps

 

You have to upload your sitemap to your website and then let search engines know that is is there.

Here is some more detailed information:
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10878_11-6140439.html

 

A site map will look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset 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" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
	<url>
		<loc>http://www.yoursite.com/</loc>
		<lastmod>2008-10-03T23:09:20+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
		<priority>1.0</priority>
	</url>
	<url>
		<loc>http://www.yoursite.com/page</loc>
		<lastmod>2008-10-03T23:09:20+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
		<priority>1.0</priority>
	</url>
	<url>
		<loc>http://www.yoursite.com/category</loc>
		<lastmod>2008-10-03T23:09:20+00:00</lastmod>
		<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
		<priority>1.0</priority>
	</url>
</urlset>

Code (markup):

NOTE: <lastmod> <changefreq> and <priority> are optional as the search engines do their own thing anyway...

After creating one of those... and name it "sitemap.xml" we upload it to our site's root (possibly /public_html or /www)

from there we can add a link to our website's footer area by editing that file... whether it be "index.html" or footer.php. The link will look like this:

<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml">Sitemap</a>

Code (markup):

From that... we hope a search engine bot will discover that link and crawl the pages we have included in our sitemap... IF you don't want to wait for that... then we submit our sitemaps directly to the search engine. Why do we do this? We want the most possible pages of our sites to be included in their index which will hopefully bring us more traffic.

You can submit sitemaps to places such as:
google.com/webmasters/tools
siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
webmaster.live.com/webmaster

That should cover the basics

 

create your sitemap from here: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ then log into your google account then go to the WebMaster tools and follow the procedure for uploading and verifying your site..

 

Thank you, this is very helpful and I will use this

 

For a good start on understanding sitemaps including when-to-use XML sitemaps versus XML sitemaps etc. you can check this xml/rss/html/text sitemaps article. It also includes code examples and explanation of all sitemap file kinds.

 

Hello,

This is very effective, I have a fairly new website that I submitted my sitemap to all of the major search engines and they already have my pages cached, it took about 24 hours to authenticate my website but after that it wasn't log before all of my pages started showing up in the search engines.

 

Last week google may have problem, google did not download and check Sitemap...

Any one know about it...

 

I am not aware of the issue, as of yet.

I sitemap maps for my website; http://cis-webhosting.com/sitemap.html and http://cis-webhosting.com/sitemap.xml , and i believe things are going well...

I am just waiting for google to come and index it again,

~ Mike

 

WE currently use gSiteCrawler to generate our xml sitemaps.