Website Sitemaps and Free Online Sitemap Generators
Sitemaps are mainly in either of two forms, as a Web page containing a sitemap of a Web site to help users find the desired Web page or as a sitemap to help search engines index available and accessible content from a Web site. One is in a user-friendly readable format viewable in a browser as a Web page while the other is readable in an XML format, but not user-friendly since the main goal is to assist the search engine crawlers locate and index content.
Sitemaps as a Web page for medium and large Web sites are nowadays commonly generated by the content management systems (CMS) powering the Web sites. XML sitemaps for search engine indexing are either created by hand for small Web sites, automatically by CMS or by using specialized tool that spider Web sites and create XML sitemaps accordingly and that is the type we focus on during the remainder of this entry.
Micro, small and medium sized Web sites have to use every appropriate way possible to make sure their content and Web pages get indexed by search engines and providing an XML sitemap in a standard format for the search engine crawlers is one way.
There are plenty of tools available to generate XML sitemaps and some are free and provided as online services. Listed below are some of these tools and helpful links.