XML Sitemaps Generator

Create Video Sitemaps
Before creating video sitemaps, you have to know what they are Video sitemaps file kind is a Google extension of XML sitemaps. If you do not know how to create these, check the XML sitemap tutorials at this website. Video sitemaps help search engines like Google to identify video content, video players and primary pages for your videos. This guide explains how to build video sitemaps in a few easy steps using this sitemap generator tool.

Crawl and Find All Videos
First use the video sitemap crawl preset to ensure the sitemap generator tool finds and keeps all video related URLs during website scan:

After that, just start the website crawl for video related URLs.

Build The Video Sitemap
Select the correct sitemap file kind to create, video sitemap:

How to Verify Video Sitemaps
Google Webmaster Tools can reports the number of page URLs in all XML sitemap files. However, strictly speaking, that is rarely what you will want to know for pure video sitemap files which only list page URLs that has video content. Instead, you will probably want to know how many videos were found and submitted to Google. Here is a trick to find the number of submitted videos in case you experiment with different video sitemap generator tools:

• Always ensure that the video sitemap only contains page URLs <loc></loc> with videos <video:loc></video:loc> associated to them.
• You can use search/replace of the <video:loc> tag in the XML video sitemap file created. Many text editors will let you know the number of found/replaced text count.

Introduction to Image Sitemaps
Does your website contain lots of images, possibly even lots of unique images? If so, it makes good sense to create an image sitemap for search engines like Google, so you more quickly can get all the images indexed and found in image related searches. This tutorial will show you how to create image sitemaps in a few simple steps using this sitemap generator tool.

As the Google image sitemap format is an extension of the standard XML sitemaps format, you can check the XML sitemap tutorials for information about how to ping and FTP upload generated image sitemaps.

Find All Images in Your Website
First make sure you configure the sitemap generator tool to collect all images during the initial website crawl:

Having done that, simply initiate the website crawl.

Create The Image Sitemap
Make sure you select the correct sitemap file kind to create, here image sitemap:

How an Image Sitemap Looks Like
Here is a simplified example showing how a simple image sitemap looks like:

<?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">
  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
    <image:image>
      <image:loc>http://www.example.com/one.png</image:loc>
      <image:title>image one title</image:title>
      <image:caption>image one caption</image:caption>
    </image:image>
  </url>
</urlset>


Verify The Image Sitemap
As Google Webmaster Tools reports the number of page URLs in all XML sitemap file kinds including image sitemaps (even those with no images associated) it can sometimes be difficult to verify the actual number of images submitted if you experiment with different sitemap generator tools. Here is a couple of things you can do:

• Make sure the image sitemap generated only contains page URLs <loc></loc> with associated images <image:loc></image:loc>.
• Try perform a search/replace of <image:loc> in the generated XML image sitemap file. Most text editors gives you a count of found/replaced text items.

A new sitemap generator video has been uploaded to YouTube on how to make xml sitemaps:

Besides explaining the benefits of sitemaps, it also shows how to scan websites, create xml sitemaps, FTP upload sitemaps and sitemap ping search engines!

Note: You can also check this shorter build sitemap video.

Both videos were made by Tom Edwards video marketing service. He will be making more sitemap generator videos in the future

At the Microsys blog, ISV Company, it is announced that a new version of the sitemap generator program has been released.

Some of the news in the sitemapper program 2.x version series have been continued improvements in quality of generated XML sitemap files of kinds such as news sitemaps and image sitemaps.

However, in this sitemap generator version 2.3, the highlight is its new filtering tool that can be used after website scan. It makes it easier to quickly identify and solve various website problems when dealing with e.g. 100,000 page URLs or perhaps even much more

Under all circumstances, if you are interested in using one of the new XML sitemaps formats created by Google, you should give A1 Sitemap Generator a chance

What are XML Sitemaps
It’s a special sitemap document protocol to help search engines index websites. This protocol uses XML for describing its content. The full name is XML Sitemaps Protocol, but is commonly referred to as XML Sitemaps. The idea and format was conceived by Google, and was in the beginning called Google Sitemaps. If you are unsure what the difference it between XML Sitemaps, HTML sitemaps, RSS feeds etc. you can check this sitemaps article.

Create XML Sitemap
A quick search on Google shows various services and products for creating XML sitemaps. Read our create XML sitemaps tutorial for more information.

Upload XML Sitemap
After creating your XML sitemaps, you will need to upload it either using your favorite FTP program or use the built-in FTP functionality (if any) in your chosen sitemap generator tool. For more information, check our XML sitemap FTP upload tutorial.

Submit XML Sitemap
You can submit XML sitemaps to all primary search engines, or/and add a reference to your XML sitemap in robots.txt to allow for search engine XML sitemap auto discovery. For more information about both options, check this submit XML sitemap article.

Ping Search Engines with XML Sitemap
While search engines will check your XML sitemap for changes themselves, you can speed this process by pinging search engines when your XML sitemap has changed. You can see how in the XML sitemaps ping post.

This tutorial will explain how to create XML sitemaps using A1 Sitemap Generator. We use default settings such as automated calculation of priority values. If you are interested in some of the advanced options or the command line interface for scheduling and automation, you can always check the help.

Crawl entire website first
Before building the XML sitemap, A1 Sitemap Generator needs to scan your website. If you want certain areas restricted, you can either create custom crawler filters or tick options for obeying no-index, no-follow, robots.txt etc. With most websites, you only need to set root path of your website followed by clicking start scan.

Website analysis and links check
After the site scan is done, you can view the website structure and detailed information for the individual pages. These tools can help you solve various website problems related to crawling. When you are done, click the Create sitemap tab.

Building the XML sitemap
In the dropdown, pick XML Sitemap and click build sitemap. The XML Sitemaps Protocol has some limits to max number of urls per XML sitemap file. However, if exceeded, A1 Sitemap Generator will automatically split all URLs out to multiple XML sitemaps and create an XML sitemap index file.

Final steps for your XML sitemap
At this point, you can choose to upload your XML Sitemap. You can also ping and update it to various search engines such as Google. If you haven’t already, it is also a good idea to create a robots.txt file with a reference to your generated XML sitemap.