Creating Sitemaps | Experienced Webmaster

Google can accept Web Sitemaps in a number of formats, but we recommend creating a Sitemap based on the Sitemap protocol because the same file can be submitted to the other search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo!, that are members of sitemaps.org.

Here’s an example of a basic Sitemap with a single entry for a URL that includes an image and a video (for convenience, only a subset of available video information is shown).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:image="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-image/1.1"
xmlns:video="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap-video/1.1">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
<image:image>
<image:loc>http://example.com/image.jpg</image:loc>
</image:image>
<video:video>
<video:content_loc>http://www.example.com/video123.flv</video:content_loc>
<video:player_loc allow_embed="yes"
autoplay="ap=1">http://www.example.com/videoplayer.swf?video=123</video:player_loc>
<video:thumbnail_loc>http://www.example.com/thumbs/123.jpg</video:thumbnail_loc>
<video:title>Grilling steaks for summer</video:title>
<video:description>Get perfectly done steaks every time</video:description>
</video:video>
</url>
</urlset>

You can create your Sitemap manually. Alternatively, there are a number of third-party tools that can help you generate Sitemaps. In addition to the standard format above, Google also accepts the following as Sitemaps:

RSS, mRSS, and Atom 1.0: Google accepts RSS (Real Simple Syndication) 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds. If you have a blog with an RSS or Atom feed, you submit the feed's URL as a Sitemap. Most blog software creates your feed for you. Note that the feed may only provide information on recent URLs. In addition, you can use an mRSS (media RSS) feed to provide Google with details about video content on your site.
Text file: For basic Web Sitemaps (Sitemaps that include only web page URLs, not image, video, or other specalized data), you can provide Google with a simple text file that contains one URL per line. For example:
http://www.example.com/file1.html
http://www.example.com/file2.html

For best results, follow these guidelines:
* You must fully specify URLs, as Google attempts to crawl them exactly as provided.
* The text file must use UTF-8 encoding.
* The text file should contain nothing but the list of URLs.
* You can name the text file anything you wish. Google recommends giving the file a .txt extension (for instance, sitemap.txt).

Once your Sitemap is complete, you can submit it to Google using Webmaster Tools.