Put Your Site on the Map with Google Sitemaps (Page 1 of 4 )
If you're a diligent site owner, you may already have a site map on your web site to help your visitors navigate. There's another kind of site map you will want to add. This article covers the nuts and bolts of creating a Google Sitemap.
A site map should be one of the most important and best maintained pages on your site; it can help visitors to navigate your site effectively and quickly find the information that they are looking for, and it shows your visitors that you care about their surfing experience. A site map is also required to meet W3C accessibility standards. An easy to use and carefully designed site will help to ensure that visitors return to your site instead of getting frustrated and forgetting it.
A site map will also find favor with search engines as it is basically a list of all of the pages in your site. But in addition to your human-readable site map (well, browser-readable at least), there is also another type of Sitemap that you should consider using. This is known as a Google Sitemap and is a way for you to complement your existing site map for humans with something to make finding and indexing your site easier for bots and spiders.
While your human-digestible site map will generally be written in a language easily interpreted and rendered by browsers, a Google Sitemap will be written in a language designed to be understood by the automated trawlers that traverse the web discovering URLs. The language used is based upon the universal language of data transfer, which is XML. It is called the Sitemap Protocol and was created by Google to help facilitate and aid existing URL discovery methods.
It has also been designed to be interoperable between different search engines, not just Google, so once you have created your Google Sitemap, there may well be other search engines that you can submit it to. It was recently announced that both Yahoo! and MSN will support the protocol. Other than the Sitemap Protocol, you could also use the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, an RSS feed or a plain text file, but for the duration of this article we'll be looking only at the open-source Sitemap Protocol.
One thing Google Sitemaps are not intended for is as a method of replacing traditional URL harvesting methods. Your Google Sitemap file is not meant to be used in place of any existing HTML site maps you may already have in place and it is not Google's new way of indexing websites. The idea is that you submit information to Google (through your Google account) which tells them that you have a Sitemap file and where this file is located. Google will then send a crawler to your site to find the Sitemap file and use it to thoroughly index your whole site (or at least that part of it covered in the file). Google Sitemaps are also not a way of guaranteeing that your site is indexed at all, or a way of improving SERPs listings or Page Rank or anything else.
You may be asking yourself that if you can't increase your rankings or guarantee a speedy indexing, "what is the point of using a Google Sitemap?" Using Google Sitemaps allows you to provide additional information about your pages, including when they were last updated, so if it has not been updated since it was last indexed, the crawler knows it does not need to be indexed again, saving both time and bandwidth. It is also useful for websites that use content which may otherwise be ignored, such as Flash-based navigation interfaces, the pages they link to being otherwise invisible to search engines. All in all, it is a good way of telling Google about your site and its URLs.
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