Expression Web 4:  How to Create an XML Sitemap

An XML Sitemap is a sitemap that we will publish to our server and also submit to Google.  This sitemap will list the web pages in our web site, plus some other important info that we'll get to shortly.  Search Engines or robots, will crawl this sitemap looking for new pages or updated pages.

 

Just follow These Steps

1.  Go to xml-sitemaps.com.  This site has an xml generator that we will use to generate our sitemap. 

2.  Next, Enter Your Details for the Sitemap where indicated.

• 1.  Enter your domain-name.com
• 2.  Change Frequency:  how often do you intend to change or add content to the pages in your site.  (I like to update and add content weekly so I've set my frequency to Weekly.)
• 3.  Last Modification:  you can keep the default choice of "Server Response Time"
• 4.  Priority:  "Choose Automatically Calculated Priority"
• 5.  Click "Start"

You can read more about each step above at xml-sitemaps.com.

Generated Results

When the Generator has completed gathering the URLs from your site, it will give you a few options to collect the results. 

Here's what I usually do...... 

1.  In Expression Web, Create an XML page and click the save icon to save it and NAME it "sitemap.xml"

How to Create an XML Page?

Click File - Hover over New - and click on Page.  Choose XML from the Middle Column and Click ok.   Now click the save icon and name it sitemap and press Enter.  Expression Web will add the ".xml" extension.

2.  Now copy the generated site map and paste it into the new xml page.  Be sure to completely replace all code on the new xml page.

3.  Save it and publish to your server.

4.  Submit the Sitemap to your Google Webmaster Tools Account.  (go get an account if you don't have one.)

 

Lastly, be sure you publish the sitmap to your server.