Why To Use Google Sitemaps
by Kaspar Gering

Why are sitemaps important? Sitemaps help search engines to better crawl your website. Sitemaps are an easy way to tell the search engines about all the pages on your website, which pages are most important to you, and when those pages change, for a smarter crawl and fresher search results.

In this article, we'll cover how to create and submit a sitemap of your website to Google Sitemaps.

What the giant says itself: "Google Sitemaps answers questions you might have about how Google sees your site. For example, you can learn about errors (such as if we're having trouble crawling your pages) and statistics (such as and what search queries return your site in the results)."

Search engines find information about your site by using software known as "spiders" to crawl the web. Once the spiders find a site, they follow links within the site to collect information about all the pages. The spiders revisit sites regularly to find new or changed content.

"Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. By using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and speed up the discovery and addition of pages to our index."

A Sitemap file doesn't replace search engines' normal methods of crawling the web, it simply gives additional information.

Google Sitemaps is a beta program, so it cannot make any predictions or guarantees about when or if your URLs will be crawled or added to Google's index. Over time, Google expects both coverage and time-to-index to improve as they refine their processes and better understand webmasters' needs.

You can see statistics and errors about your website if you have a Google Account. Even if you don't have a sitemap, you still can see the statistics and errors about your website. You can simply add your website to your account and verify ownership of it.

Let's get started:

1) Create a Google Account. You can create a Google Account at www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps. See the right side of the Google's page to continue.

2) Log in with your Google Account and add your website's URL.

3) Verify your site ownership. If you can upload a verification file to the same location as your Sitemap or to the site's root, Google considers you a site owner and will show you site details.

4) Create a Sitemap in a supported format. See the tools' section at manfred-knows.com and search for the ROR Sitemap Generator. Download it, install it and generate a sitemap file (xml file)

5) Add the Sitemap to your Google Sitemaps account.

6) Congratulations ! You are done !

I recommend you to update your sitemap when your site changes. When you've updated your sitemap file, remember to resubmit your sitemap in your Google's account, too. I hope this article was useful !

Visit Manfred-Knows.com to read more articles like this. Manfred-Knows.com also provides free seo tools (including Sitemap Generator) !

Blogging to the Bank ! 
How to Earn Huge Affiliate Commissions Using Blogs To Generate Free Traffic.