Put Your Site on the Map with Google Sitemaps - Completing and Uploading Your Sitemap
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A complete Sitemap file, from the examples above, would be as follows:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
xmlns=http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84>
<url>
<loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2006-12-06</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
Once your sitemap is created, you should upload it to the highest level directory to which you have access. It can be compressed using gzip to save on bandwidth and should be less that 10 MB in its uncompressed state. If your site is so big that 10 MB is not enough, you can create multiple sitemaps, but to do this you will also need to create a Sitemap Index file. This file follows a very similar format to the Sitemap files:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sitemapindex
xmlns=http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap1.xml</loc>
</sitemap>
<sitemap>
<loc>http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap2.xml</loc>
</sitemap>
</sitemapindex>
It's very similar as you can see, except the <urlset> is replaced by <sitemap index> and <sitemap> is used instead of <url>. The only optional tag is the <lastmod> tag, which follows the same date and time format as before.
Finally, you need to tell Google and the other supporting search engines that the Sitemap file exists. You can do this easily and quickly for Google using the Webmaster Tools section of the Submit Content section of Google's Webmaster Central: www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. Once your site appears in the Site column, select the Add a Sitemap link, choose Add General Web Sitemap from the combo box and enter the URL of the Sitemap file. Your sitemap will then appear in the Sitemaps section of your website information and details are provided on its current status, when it was submitted and the URLs that were submitted. If there are any problems with your Sitemap file, they will be reported.
The methods for submitting to MSN and Yahoo! may vary considerably; in fact, a cursory check of both of these sites reveals no immediately apparent way to submit information relating to the location of your sitemap protocol file. Yahoo! does have a page where you can submit a plain text file to help with indexing your site, so perhaps this will be expanded soon to take in a URL leading to your sitemap file.
The Sitemap Protocol was released in July last year but has grown since then. For example, you can also specify Mobile Sitemaps for providing information on a site created for viewing on PDAs or mobile phones, and at the tail end of November last year, Google announced that if your English-language news site appeared in Google News, you could specify additional publication information using the News Sitemaps XML Definition. There's no telling what else will be available in the future and which other search engines will take up support.
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