Last update : June 16, 2013
Sitemap’s are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. Sitemaps also offer human visitors an overview of a website to easily navigate. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

The sitemap xml protocol 0.90, available on www.sitemaps.org,  is offered under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike Creative Commons License and has wide adoption, including support from Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

There are several tools available to generate sitemaps. My favorite is the online sitemap generator from xml-sitemap.com.

A quick guide for creating sitemaps is available on www.sitemapxml.co.uk. Detailled user guides are edited by the search engines providers, for example by Google.

On 13th august 2009, I installed the standalone sitemap generator from XML-Sitemaps.com succesfully.