I have been running different website portals since 2006. Initially I never given importance to sitemap as I didn’t knew it’s importance. The main reason of ignoring the Sitemaps is as it was difficult to understand and implement if you do not have good technical skills. Many websites has explained about the Sitemaps but I never found it easy. Today I am going to explain what is Sitemap, How to create Sitemap for Google. I will also explain about XML Sitemap Generator and Location.
What is Sitemap
Before I explain what is Sitemap I hope you understand about search engines indexing. If you all your webpages are listed in search engine it means you are indexed but what if you add new pages or alter existing pages how come search engine will know when and how your website is updated. You have submitted your website to search engines when you have initialed created your website or may be when you started SEO for your website. After that initial steps, you must know the way to notify the search engines about your website changes. Like you add new content or you may be altering or updating the existing content, may be you are updating website daily and those updates are not reflecting in search engines.
Sitemaps is just like or notifier or communicator between your website and search engine bots. In simple words sitemap helps to crawl all your website updates by search engines as soon as the changes are done in your website. You just need to make sure that your Sitemap is properly built and updated when you make changes on your website. Many websites do not have the effect of Sitemap as it is not properly built and many other similar reasons.
Sitemap for Google
In my personal opinion I rate Google as number one search engine in this industry. Having Google Sitemap will be a very plus point for your website. You will be having opportunity to listed and being updated in Google specially when you are website new, usually a new website may take months to fully crawl for search engines while having Sitemap will make it fast.
Google says itself in their Website Guidelines that you must have a XML Sitemap for your website so that your website can be crawled regularly by Google. In Google Sitemap you can specifically indicate the metadata about various categories in your website just like images, videos or mobile.
Google Sitemap Generator
It is easy to generating or creating Google Sitemap, remember Google accept Sitemap Protocol 0.9 which you can study at www.sitemaps.org. I know a good website XML-Sitemaps.com which is an Sitemap Generator for Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. Please do not ignore Sitemaps as search engines will better crawl your website and this gives exposure to more visitors for your website. If you running an open source CMS, you may find an XML Sitemap Generator plugin or component offered by CMS vendor.
XML Sitemap Location
The website webmaster will be setting up the Sitemap location according the nature of their website, just like in my case I have http://www.webseorank.com/sitemap.xml and you can also define Sitemap.xml path in your robot.txt file. This basically depends on which URL’s you want to be included in your Sitemap.
Submit XML Sitemap In Google Webmaster Tools
Rememberto submit your Sitemap.xml in Google Webmaster Tools and this will allow Google to keep updated your website information their search engine.
