How do I add a Sitemap to my website?

A Sitemap is a list of pages on your site accessible to visitors or search engines. The most popular use of the Sitemap is for Search Engine Optimization. It provides search engines a file that can be quickly scanned to find the pages of your site. This means that all of your pages have a better chance of being indexed. While there are different ways to make a Sitemap, the fastest is using a free online tool.

There are various websites online that offer a free Sitemap generator. For this example we will use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com for generating an XML Sitemap. After navigating to the website, fill in your website information and click Start:

While it's working it will show your website being scanned:

Once it is complete, you will have an .xml file that you can upload to your site:

Remember that the file will not be linked on your actual website. This Sitemap is just for search engines crawling your website. The search engine will crawl the .xml file and use it to help them index your site.

Once you have downloaded the .xml file, you will want to upload it into your document root. This will be your public_html folder if the Sitemap is for your primary domain. If it's for an Addon Domain, place it in the document root for that Addon domain (usually a folder under public_html with the same name as the Addon domain). To upload your Sitemap, access your cPanel File Manager or use an FTP client.

Once your Sitemap is uploaded, there are a couple of optional steps you can take to help speed up the process of seach engines finding your Sitemap. While these steps are not required, they may help speed up the process of search engines finding it.

• Using your Google Webmaster Tools account you can submit your Sitemap to Google for indexing.


• You can also add the following line to your robots.txt file (be sure to replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name):


sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

If you make major changes to your site, you will want to generate a new sitemap. Simply repeat the steps outlined above.