Most of you who indulge in a bit of search engine optimisation will probably be aware of Googles new Site Map Beta program http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/protocol.html
For those that have an interest in search engine optimisation or indeed the Google Site map Beta program, read on...

Whilst Google does not guarantee a better ranking, or indeed that they will crawl your site any better by using the resultant sitemap.xml file, the old adage "every little helps" should be remembered.

Most of you probably either will not have Python installed on your hosting account or are not able to install Python to take advatage of the Google site map creator software so, having done a bit of research on alternative methods of creating a Sitemap acceptable to Google, here is my result.

There seem to be a lot of sites cropping up advertising 'get your Google site map here', many are useless, many require payment of a 'fee' and others, although looking promising, limit the number of links you can create.

My own method for creating sitemaps which I would like to share with you, with gracious thanks to those who shared their knowledge was predominantly derived from information contained in this thread.

Rather than get into a lengthy post regarding the why's and wherefore's I'll just give you a brief summary as it is covered in detail in the above link.

Use a free software program called Xenu which you can download here; http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Download This you use to crawl your site and create 'acceptable' links. The resultant file is then exported from Xenu as a TAB delimited file which is then imported into an Excel spredsheet where the Excel macro is run to create your sitemap file.
In order to be fair to the original author of the Excel workbook containing the conversion macro, I have created an alternative download location here so they do not run into bandwidth problems.
The Excel macro automatically saves your sitemap file into your 'My Docs' folder ready to be uploaded to your website.
Submit the link to your sitemap.xml file to your google account and it will crawl it usually within a couple of hours.


Finally, here is an example sitemap taken from one of my sites which took me about 10 minutes to do.
If I can do it, anyone can :) and Xenu allows me total control of not just directories but also individual files which I may want to include or exclude from the sitemap.