Generating Sitemap
Sitemap is a file which contains a list of the web page adresses or all of the links within the web site. In order to understand how and why sitemaps are useful, we should learn a bit about how search engines work.
Search engines find and read web sites via robots (or spiders, crawlers) . Spiders find a web site and read it. If they found any link to another web site or to another web page, they follow links and start reading and saving information for search engines. If you have not linked a web page within your website, crawler can not find it so it is not indexed by search engines. So you can use sitemap to be sure all of web pages within a web site is crawled.
How to Generate Sitemap
You can use sitemap generator tools to generate sitemaps. Visit this website and type your website adress. It will generate sitemap for your website in a few seconds. After generated, download sitemaps. I usually prefer sitemaps named urllist.txt and sitemap.xml.
As you see from the picture above, I created sitemaps for my website and downloaded urllist.txt and sitemap.xml files. After I send them to the root folder, I have to make search engines be aware of these sitemaps. To do that we can add a link for sitemaps from website's homepage but we will use Google Webmaster Tools. Let's start...
Visit Google Webmaster Tools, type your website url and click Add Site button.
Next step is to verify our website. In other words, we will persuade Google that we are the owner of this website. We can verify it by uploading a web page or by adding a meta tag to homepage. I selected to upload an html page (1)and Google determined an html page that I have to upload to the server.(2) After I created and uploaded html page, I should click Verify button to finalize the verification.
Now its time to add sitemaps for our website. Click on "Sitemaps>Add Sitemap" link (1) and select "Add General Web Sitemap" (2) Later, type sitemap name and click on Add General Web Sitemap button. Repeat the same steps for sitemap named urllist.txt