I am not a webmaster or a programmer but how do you go about creating a site map for a website, I was curious? I just read a post that said you create an xml document / file but they didn't really go into the details. For example, lets say I have a huge ecommerce website with tons of category pages and sub category, how would I create this file and how would I go about making sure the file automatically updates when I add neww sub-categories, etc? It would be tough to manually add all of these hundreds of links so I am just wondering how people go about doing it? The major search engines have adopted what is called the Sitemaps protocol. (Note that the word Sitemaps starts with a capital S and site and maps are squished together)
Quote: Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are
Quote: Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are