…so jump to the section of this page that address the kind of sitemap you want to create.<\/p>\n
If someone told you this site mapping<\/a> thing is a good idea, but you don’t fully know why – here’s a simple explanation about sitemaps and sitemap generators<\/a> so you can dominate those sitemap discussions around the water cooler.<\/p>\n Creating an XML sitemap isn’t difficult once you know how. It’s basically a list of URLs written in a code format (see picture below), which obeys the formatting ‘rules’ set out by sitemaps.org.<\/p>\n This file is normally called sitemap.xml<\/em><\/strong> and sits in the root folder of your website (beside index.html<\/em><\/strong>).<\/p>\n First up, it’s worth checking if the platform you’ve built your website on automatically creates XML sitemaps for you.<\/p>\n Try typing in yourwebsite.com\/sitemap.xml<\/strong><\/em> or yourwebsite.com\/sitemap_index.xml<\/strong><\/em> to quickly check if you have one already. Or try these further steps on how to find your sitemap<\/a>.<\/p>\n Creating a XML sitemap by having a tool crawl your website is the smart choice regardless of the number of pages in your website.<\/p>\n Writemaps Sitemap Generator<\/a> allows you to crawl your website and generate a visual sitemap automatically which you can export in XML. In addition to XML, you can also export your sitemap in PDF, Image, Json or Text format. If you are only looking to generate XML sitemap, a simple yet effective tool for this is xml-sitemaps.com<\/a> which crawls up to 500 pages for free.<\/p>\n You just enter in your site’s URL, and you get back a sitemap.xml file with all the pages that it found when crawling.<\/p>\n Don’t do this. Just crawl your site using a tool – it’ll be faster than learning the XML code format that sitemaps need to be provided in.<\/p>\n Okay, if you really want to, then sitemaps.org are the authority on sitemaps. If you know how to code, then their guidelines are pretty simple and it won’t take too long.<\/p>\n TIP: Once you have your\u00a0sitemap.xml as part of your website, then all that’s left to do is to submit that sitemap URL to google<\/a>.<\/p>\n Creating a visual sitemap helps you plan out a website. Get all those brainstormy thoughts from everyone into an organised diagram which shows the pages that you want in your website.<\/p>\n Now you can do this with pen & paper, or create an indented bullet-point list in a doc. But there’s also online tools like our sitemap builder at WriteMaps.com<\/a> which save you time drawing lines and boxes.<\/p>\n You can also add notes, content, and colors to each page.. which is much harder to do in Word or on the back of a napkin!<\/p>\n Here’s a quick website planning process you can modify to make your own:<\/p>\n Creating a HTML sitemap is something you would do to help visitors on your website find their way around – it’s normally only used in huge sites with A LOT of content. If you site is small-medium (say less than 100 content pages) then just relying on good menus and navigation is fine.<\/p>\n A HTML sitemap is just a giant organised list of links, like this one from Macy’s<\/a>. No rocket science about it, just get all your links on a page and looking somewhat orderly.<\/p>\n Unfortunately some platforms (like Squarespace) don’t provide HTML sitemaps.<\/p>\n So you’ll need to add a new page, and add the content of your HTML sitemap to it.<\/p>\n Now let’s be smart about this, there are free tools out there to crawl your website and give you back a list of pages.<\/p>\n
\nJump to:<\/h3>\n
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\n![\"meme](\"https:\/\/writemaps.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/sitemaps-fry.png\")
<\/h2>\n1. How to create a sitemap .xml file<\/h2>\n
![\"how](\"https:\/\/writemaps.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/Google-Screenshot_2018-07-16_11.26.59.png\")
Does your website already have an XML sitemap?<\/h3>\n
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Create a XML sitemap automagically<\/em><\/h3>\n
Create a XML sitemap manually<\/h3>\n
2. How to create a visual sitemap<\/h2>\n
![\"how](\"https:\/\/writemaps.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/visual-sitemap-in-WriteMaps.png\")
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3. How to create a sitemap for website navigation – HTML sitemap<\/h2>\n
![\"how](\"https:\/\/writemaps.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/macys-html-sitemap.png\")
<\/p>\nThe smart way to create an HTML sitemap<\/h3>\n