How To Create an XML Sitemap Under 3 Minutes

A lot of folks complain about the difficulty of writing a XML Sitemap for their sites. In fact, many of these folks come up with these excuses that “sitemaps don’t matter” and Google “doesn’t like sitemaps” in order to justify them not taking time to create a sitemap for their site. I do agree that adding a sitemap is not going to push your site all the way to the top of the Google SERPs. But having a sitemap in place is not only a best practice, but also helps Google go through your site structure without too much trouble.

If you have a blog or a dynamic site with thousands of pages, you are well-served to have a sitemap in place. But you don’t even have to know XML to create a sitemap for your site. You can always use thousands of sitemap makers that are available on the Internet. I personally use XML-Sitemaps for my sites. XML-Sitemaps is a premium solution. If you have Ruby on Rails site or a particularly huge site, you can pay a small premium to acquire the script you need to create XML sitemaps on the fly. But the first 500 pages can be indexed for free. So if you have a blog or a dynamic site that only has about 500 pages, you don’t even have to pay a fee.

At the end of the day, I prefer not to take any chances when it comes to optimizing my sites for the search engines. I have heard from some very paranoid folks that Google actually penalizes sites with XML site-maps. That’s not true, and a poor of an excuse to avoid getting the site-map done for your site. It’s not as if you have to do it yourself anyway.

What tools do you use to create sitemaps for yours? Do you do it by hand?