A well-structured and submitted sitemap is essential for driving traffic to your website. By creating an effective sitemap and submitting it to major search engines, you significantly improve the visibility of your site’s content in relevant search results. If your goal is to monetize your website, it’s crucial to invest a few minutes in creating and submitting your sitemap. This comprehensive guide will walk you through the process and provide you with step-by-step instructions on how to get started. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to optimize your website’s performance—create and submit your sitemap today.

1-Open a new document

To begin, open a new document in a plain text editor like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac. This approach is ideal for smaller websites where you will manually input each page.

2- Create your sitemap template

To create your sitemap template, simply copy and paste the following content into your text document. Basic sitemaps are XML files that are submitted to search engines, making it easier for them to crawl and understand your website’s structure. By using this format, you can efficiently list all the pages on your site:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  
  <!-- Insert your URLs here -->
  
</urlset>

Remember to insert your website’s URLs within the designated section of the template.

3- Replace the example 

Replace the example <loc> tags in the template with the URLs of your website. To retrieve the URLs, open your website in a browser and navigate through each page. Copy the URLs from the browser’s address bar and paste them into the corresponding <loc> tags in the template.

If your website has more pages than available space in the template, you can duplicate the <url> section at the bottom as many times as needed. This allows you to accommodate all the pages of your website in the sitemap.

4- Enhance your sitemap by using optional tags in the template

You can enhance your sitemap by using optional tags in the template. In the example’s first entry, you’ll notice several tags that can be added to each URL. While these tags are optional, they can facilitate the crawling process for search engine bots.

The <lastmod> tag represents the date when your page was last modified. You can include this tag to provide information on the most recent updates to your content.

The <changefreq> tag indicates the frequency of updates to your page. You can use values like “always” to indicate that your page is updated every time a user views it, or “never” to indicate that it remains static and archived.

The <priority> tag allows you to assign a relative importance value to each page on your site compared to other pages. The value can range from 0.0 to 1.0, with 0.5 being the default priority for all pages.

Including these optional tags in your sitemap can provide additional information to search engines about your website’s content, update frequency, and relative importance of pages.

5- Save the file as an XML file

1. Click on “File” in your text editor.
2. Select “Save As” from the dropdown menu.
3. In the “Save As” dialog box, make sure to choose “All Files” in the “Save as type” menu.
4. Change the file extension from “.txt” to “.xml”.
5. Name the file “sitemap.xml” or any other desired name.
6. Choose a suitable location on your computer to save the file.
7. Click “Save” to save the file with the specified name and extension.

By saving the file as “sitemap.xml” with the XML file extension, you ensure that it adheres to the standard XML format required for sitemaps.

6- To upload the sitemap to your server

1. Access your web server using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client or a file manager provided by your hosting service.
2. Navigate to the root folder of your website. This is typically called “public_html” or “www” on most servers.
3. Copy the sitemap.xml file that you created to the root folder of your web server.
4. Ensure that the file is placed directly in the root folder and not within any subdirectories.
5. Once the file is successfully uploaded, you can access your sitemap using the URL: www.example.com/sitemap.xml, where “example.com” is your domain name.

By placing the sitemap.xml file in the root folder of your web server, you make it easily accessible for search engines to locate and crawl when indexing your website.

7- submit your sitemap to search engines

1. Log in to the Webmaster Tools or Search Console provided by the search engine of your choice (such as Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools).
2. Navigate to the Sitemap section within the respective tool.
3. Look for the field where you can submit the URL of your sitemap.
4. Copy the URL of your sitemap (for example, www.example.com/sitemap.xml).
5. Paste the sitemap URL into the designated field.
6. Follow any additional instructions or prompts provided by the search engine’s Webmaster Tools.
7. Submit your sitemap for processing.

By submitting your sitemap to search engines, you ensure that they are aware of the existence and location of your sitemap file. This allows search engine crawlers to efficiently discover and index your website’s content, increasing the visibility of your pages in search results.