Sitemaps: Guide The Spiders to Your Site

Sitemaps are an easy way to inform search engines about your website & the pages on it that are available for crawling. A sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site, along with additional information about each URL (like when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site). Sitemaps give out all this information to the search engines important so that they can crawl the site more intelligently.

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site is updated frequently.
• Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process – for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
• Your site is new and has few links to it.
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

You can generate sitemaps of your site by use the Google Sitemap Generator.