What are site maps and why would you want to create one?

A site map is simply another page, or pages, containing links to every page on your website, perhaps with a short description of the contents. So it’s like a book index, which lists every topic in the book.

They can be useful to visitors, who are searching your site for a particular subject, and they allow the search engine spiders to index every page on your website. Both good reasons to create a site map.

Google’s webmaster tools provides help and advice on site maps. By building a site map the way google likes to see it, then submitting it, you are helping the search engine spiders to crawl your site more effectively.

Now if building and maintaining a site map sounds like too much work, there is an easier way. Use a site map generator. XML sitemaps allows you to build your own sitemap online. It works by crawling the pages of your website. Once it’s generated you can download it and add it to your website.

You should also sign up for a google webmaster account. It’s free. And you can add your site map URL for google to crawl. With a webmaster account you can also see if the spiders cannot access any of your pages, and what queries drive traffic to your site.

If you run a wordpress blog, you can download a google sitemap generator plugin, install it and have your blog sitemap up and running in no time. And, it updates automatically every time you create a new post. But don’t forget to submit the URL to google so it can crawl your site.

So a sitemap is definately worthwhile as it helps your visitors find stuff and gets you indexed and crawled by the world’s most popular search engine.