Whether or not to have a sitemap for your ecommerce store has been a debate amongst SEOs since I got into ecommerce & internet marketing in early 2003. Back in the day it was recommended to create an HTML web page on your website that displayed all pages within your store. Nowadays that just looks messy and distracts customers from your "money" pages.

In today's current environment, I highly recommend creating an XML sitemap and notifying Google about it's existence. Your Google Webmaster Tools has a submission page for it, so it's quite evident that Google appreciates it and utilizes it to index all of your pages. Follow the steps below to create a sitemap and submit it to Google for processing:

1. Create a Sitemap

Very soon we will be adding an automatic-sitemap generator within Zulu Cart's admin panel. It will automatically create a sitemap file every 24 hours for your store. Until that feature is built, follow these directions to manually create a sitemap for your store:

1. Go to xml-sitemaps.com in another tab or window.
2. In the top field, enter the exact URL of your domain name (making sure to either include or leave out the 'www', depending on what you decided earlier).
3. Without changing anything else, click the 'Start' button below to start generating your sitemap.
4. Once the processing is completed, you will be sent to a page where you can download the sitemap that was generated. Click on 'sitemap.xml' from the list within the 'Download Sitemap' section and choose to save it to your desktop.

2. Upload Your Sitemap to Your Store

Your sitemap should be stored on the same web hosting account as the domain name that it was created for. The default location for a sitemap is www.domain.com/sitemap.xml. Follow these steps to put the sitemap you created in the previous step in that location:

1. Go to your website's cpanel (www.domain.com/cpanel) and click on 'File Manager' under the 'Files' section. This will open up the file manager.
2. Once inside the file manager, make sure you are in the public_html folder. If you aren't, navigate there before moving to the next step.
3. Click on the 'Upload' icon from the menu above. Once the page that comes up, use the top browse button to locate and select the sitemap.xml file you previously saved to your desktop.
4. When the upload is complete, you can close all browsers relating to the file manager and cpanel. Your sitemap should now be accessible through a web browser at www.domain.com/sitemap.xml.

3. Notify Google of Your Sitemap

Now that your sitemap has been uploaded onto your store's web hosting account, we want to notify Google that it exists. Google would find out about it on it's own in due time, but there's really no reason to wait for that when there's a simple way to quickly inform them. Follow these steps to notify Google of your sitemap's existence and speed up the process of indexing all of your website's pages:

1. Sign into the Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) account that you created during the Launch Your Store Checklist.
2. Once within your GWT account, you should see a list of the websites you are managing, click on the one you just created this sitemap for (make sure to choose the correct www vs non-www version of the website).
3. On the left side, click on the 'Site Configuration' category to open it, and then select 'Sitemaps' within it.
4. On the left side, click on the 'Site Configuration' category to open it, and then select 'Sitemaps' within it.
5. Within the body of this page, click on the 'Submit a Sitemap' button. Then enter 'sitemap.xml' (without to the quotes) and click 'Submit Sitemap'.
6. You have now notified Google of this sitemaps existence. You can refresh the page about 30 seconds later and see that the sitemap was processed.

From here on out you can follow these steps to submit your sitemap to Google every week or two. The only difference in the steps is during this final step within your GWT account, you will click the box next to the sitemap name and click 'Resubmit Sitemap' rather than submitting a new one each time.