Let’s face it, listing the web page URL line by line manually in the sitemap file is really tedious and a pain in the a**! What a way to build up your web site list for the robots to crawl your web pages! There must be a better way to do it, right? After all, what is the purpose of programming but to automate the process, yes?
Rightly so, there is indeed software available to generate a sitemap automatically. There are quite a number of sitemap generating tools freely available online which you could download and use. Look for one that is simple and easy to use.
There are three ways you could generate sitemap, offsite in your desktop computer, online website sitemap generator service or automatically on your website by using a plug-in installed in your CMS or blogging application.
If you are building a web site page by page manually or having some trouble getting a plug-in module to work with your CMS or blogging application, then an offsite sitemap generator running in your desktop computer would be a good option.
For example, I was using the Joomla CMS system, since I’m not very good at coding, and the installation of any Joomla module was rather complicated and the risk of damaging the Joomla program was very likely, I opted to use an offsite sitemap generator. Using a desktop based sitemap generator may not be as efficient as using an onsite plug in, since the file created will need to be uploaded manually each time it was updated; but it was a better alternative for me to having to install a Joomla module that was rather complicated and risky to do.
You could also opt for online sitemap generators given freely (and not so free) by various third party websites if you don’t wish to install any software into your desktop computer for one reason or another.
On the other hand, installing the automated sitemap generator plug-in into applications like Drupal and WordPress was very easily done. Though it would still be a good idea to test the plug-in installation on a test site to see if it worked according to the author who programmed it before using it live into your actual web site.
You may look through this list given by Google to search for a sitemap generator that could be used in your desktop, or use the online sitemap generator website service or download a plug-in and install it into your favourite CMS application:
http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html
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