If you have done any search engine optimization for your blog or others, you have probably heard of the concept of XML sitemaps. Whether you have a site built on Ruby on Rails (ROR), or you are just looking to create an HTML sitemap for your dynamic Joomla or WordPress site, having search engine sitemaps can help robots find their way through your website.
Now if you know XML (which by the way is not that difficult), you can come up with a decent sitemap for your WordPress site. But if you are like me and post frequently to your sites, you’d be surprised how much time it will take to create a sitemap for your blog. Now keep in mind that if you have a very small blog, you may want to stick with the free version of this software, but if you have a huge website, you can save yourself a lot of time and trouble as XML-Sitemaps:
- creates XML, ROR, Text, and HTML sitemaps for your blog. This is especially useful for Ruby on Rails sites.
- Pings search engines when your sitemap is complete so they can send their robots to use your sitemaps to find about your hard to reach websites.
- Discover broken links so you can fix them in time before search engines penalize you for having them on your site.
- Allows you to create cron jobs to automate the process of sitemap generation. In essence, you can set it and forget it with this PHP script.
I have personally used the paid version of this program, and it has saved me a ton of time by automating things and minimizing the effort on my part. But a lot of my friends have not graduated to the paid version. You can create site-maps for websites with less than 500 pages. Believe it or not, a lot of my clients have less than 200, so the free version will do. You get all the formats when the process is done:
A lot of people talk about how sitemaps are overrated, and I even heard from my former boss that he thought sitemaps would hurt our ranking. But that usually comes from people who don’t want to put the effort to create sitemaps. But with this script, you can do everything automatically, so there is no excuse. Check it out for yourself here.