Creating sitemap.xml manually

Wondering … how to optimized your website for search engines like google?

Here’s one that will help you how to increase your site’s search engine visibility.

How to create Sitemap.xml manually using your plain old text editor…

1.) Create a text file using notepad and save it Sitemap.xml.
2.) Type or copy the following text in the first and second line of the xml file.
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>

3.) For each links or pages you wish to be crawl by search engine add the following format.


<url>
<loc>http://www.qlickcafe.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>

<url>
<loc>http://www.qlickcafe.com/blogs/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
4. After encoding all your pages or links end it with a closing tag for the urlset.
” </urlset> ”

5. Then upload the file to your /root folder where you saved the index.html or index.php .

Note that Sitemap protocol format consists of XML tags. All data values in a Sitemap must be entity-escaped. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded.

The Sitemap must:

  • Begin with an opening <urlset> tag and end with a closing </urlset> tag.
  • Specify the namespace (protocol standard) within the <urlset> tag.
  • Include a <url> entry for each URL, as a parent XML tag.
  • Include a <loc> child entry for each <url> parent tag.

All other tags are optional. Support for these optional tags may vary among search engines. Refer to each search engine’s documentation for details.

Also, all URLs in a Sitemap must be from a single host, such as www.example.com or store.example.com. For further details, refer the Sitemap file location

Sample XML Sitemap

The following example shows a Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags. The optional tags are in italics.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
   <url>
      <loc>http://www.qlickcafe.com/</loc>
      <lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
      <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
      <priority>0.8</priority>
   </url>
</urlset>

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