I wanted to create an xml sitemap for each of my websites, as I feel sure that they help get you listed on search engines, and improve your search results. I went to the webmasters section on Google and looked at their instructions for creating a sitemap ... well... they may aswell have been written in chinese!! I think you have to be an IT geek to make any sense out of them . So I went to one of the sites listed by Google as offering xml sitemap creation software. I then followed the instructions, submitted to Google and waited. 2 days later, I logged into my Google account and found that the sitemap had been rejected!! All that work for nothing! I began to think that I was going to have to pay to get a sitemap which Google would accept.

Now, being a web entrepreneur, I really don't like paying for things, as there is so much great free stuff on the web ... if only you know where to look! ... and can wade through the stuff that is not really free, or doesn't work properly. I had spent hours searching the net for a free tool to create a sitemap. I was about to give up, and I thought I would give it one more go. It must have been my lucky day, because then I found XML-Sitemaps. Their free site map generator will index up to 500 pages. If your website has more pages, you can pay for a standalone version with unlimited number of pages. To use the free tool, just go to the main website at www.xml-sitemaps.com and enter the url of your website, click the Start button, wait 5 minutes and your sitemap is produced as if by magic! Yes, it really is that easy. All you do then, is to download it to your website and submit it to Google sitemaps from your webmasters account. The sitemap is in xml format which is for the search engine spiders to crawl over. You have an option to create an html version to use for human visitors to your website, showing the whole site structure.

I recently submitted a sitemap to Google for a new website, and my home page was indexed on Google 18 days after first being published. It can take weeks to get indexed by Google, so I think those results speak for themselves. This is the best free webmasters tool I have found to date... I will let you know if I stumble across any others!

Lin Parker
http://www.888dates.co.uk