Sitemaps are not a new phenomenon at all. They were invented mainly for your web visitors to have a demographic lay of the land, so to speak, of your website. Sitemaps give a hierarchial view of the webpages that exist already on your site. That said people are now creating sitemaps for a whole new reason, to help major Search Engine spiders index all the pages on your website. The more pages indexed by a search engine the greater chance you have that someone will type in your keywords and see your pages as a result. So have sitemap, may get more traffic.

Reasons You should create a Sitemap
There are a couple of search engines doing sitemap submissions right now, of them all Google is the leader with their Sitemaps Beta. Basically all you do is submit your sitemap here and tell it how often you will do updates to your website and then the Google spiders will crawl your site to index all your new content. Though be warned though you submit your sitemap, by way Google’s own Development team, it is not a guarantee that your website will be crawled any faster than normal. I.e. don’t submit a sitemap and then instantly expect your brand new website to have all its pages indexed by Google. However do submit a sitemap so that once Google does start indexing your website already the spiders are more aware of updates to your site and new content that you are publishing.

Another reason you should create a sitemap is to disallow search engine spiders from crawling pages in your website. Reasons you might want to do this are to keep cgi-bin files from being crawled, redundent content from being crawled (hurts your PR), or another other privacy reason.

How do I create a Sitemap?
There are really two types of sitemaps you can create, a .txt based sitemap where you just list all your webpages, one per line and put it in your root directory. You can get information how to do this from the Google Sitemap website.

Or better yet you can create an XML sitemap. There are a lot of places to get XML sitemaps generated for free. I used SiteMapsPal and it worked for me. Just enter your url and you’ll get a sitemap generated in the box which you can then copy and paste into a file.

Another tool for the utility belt. Good habits are developed early and creating sitemaps for your websites is good practice to start.

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