What is a sitemap?
With a sitemap, you can inform a searchengine (like google or yahoo) which pages should be crawled and indexed. A sitemap.xml also specifies how often a page changes (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly), so the searchengine knows how often the page should be recrawled. A sitemap can also give a priority to each page (from 1.0 to 0.1) to indicate how important the page is ir relation to other pages of your website (1.0 is most important)
Why create a sitemap.xml?
A sitemap helps a searchengine to index your site. If you want your site to be indexed by Google, usinge a sitemap.xml not only helps to get your pages correcly crawled and indexed. You can specify how often a page changes, so Google knows how often is should recrawl the page! A sitemap is an XML-file. You can write the sitemap.xml mannualy, but ofcourse it is more easy just to use our online sitemap.xml tool to create your sitemap.xml instant (and free) online.
Let Google index your website:
Create a Google-account and go to the Google Webmaster Tools. There you can specify your website(s) and give the location of your sitemap (ex. http://www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml). Google will index your website (this can take some days, but in most cases only a few hours!)
More advantages with sitemaps and Google Webmaster Tools: you can see when Google crawled your site, and if some pages contained errors and Google could not crawl them.
The conclusion is simple:
If you want your website to be indexed by Google, create a sitemap! The benefits are hugh, and the effort to make a sitemap.xml is minimal.3 easy steps:
- -Create a sitemap just by entering your website above on this page
- -Download the sitemap.xml, and upload it to your website
- -Go to your Google-account >> Webmaster Tools, and submit your website and the location of your sitemap