Microsys Blog

Recent New Features in The Software

New versions of the A1 Sitemap Generator program are released regularly. Some of the consistent news in our sitemapper software and been the continued improvements in quality of generated HTML and XML sitemap files. However, also new tools for general website auditing are being developed and added.

For XML sitemaps, the improvements can in particular be found in generated image sitemaps and video sitemaps. For the HTML sitemaps, it is mostly “behind-the-scenes” with new customization and template options. (For best visual results when creating HTML sitemaps, be sure to check the sitemap template system. This makes it possible to have a generated HTML/CSS sitemap look like your existing website layout.)

One of the other recent highlights is the new dynamic filtering that combined with sorting and content duplication tools can be used to quickly identify and solve various website problems after website scans. This is useful when dealing with e.g. 100,000 page URLs or perhaps even much more.

Quick Lesson on Getting Started with Sitemaps

In this writeup tutorial on creating sitemaps, I will be using our own sitemapper tool named A1 Sitemap Generator. This is a program of which the first version was released in 2005 to a limited group of people, and it has since then been continuously developed. The software comes with a 30 days free trial period and runs on all recent Windows versions. (If using a virtualization solution, it can also run under Mac and Linux).

You can create all kinds of sitemap file kinds including URL list, HTML, RSS/ROR, XML, video, image and mobile sitemaps. If you are particulary interested in a specific kind of sitemap, skip ahead to our complete list of sitemap tutorials and help pages.

The “How to” Steps on Building Sitemaps

1. Have the sitemapper tool crawl your website:
   • If you wish to create an image or video sitemap, click the “Quick presets…” button first.
     (The configuration presets available can be good for quickly setting up new projects, in particular for new users.)
   • Enter in your website address.
   • Click the “Start scan” button.
   • Wait until the website crawl has finished.

   

2. View the results of the website crawl:
   • If you need to solve broken links and redirects, this is where you do it!
   • This window will show you all website errors + where all URLs are linked to from.
   • URLs that “301 redirect” or “404 not found” are not included in generated sitemaps.

   

3. Building the actual site map files:
   • Select the “Create sitemap” tab.
   • Select the sitemap file type to create and hit the “Build sitemap” button.
4. Incase you want to create HTML sitemaps for your real life human visitors:
   • You can edit and change the HTML site map template before building your HTML sitemap. his allows you to create visual HTML/CSS sitemaps that match your site layout.
   • Tip: You can “include” your generated sitemap file inside other files if you use SSI, PHP, ASP and similar server site solutions and programming languages.

   

5. Upload your new sitemap files and submit them in places like Google Webmaster Tools.