Creating a sitemap is a vital step when launching a new site if you want this site to be indexed properly and quickly. It is the best possible way to tell the search engines, and not only Google, that there is a site out there with a certain number of pages waiting to be crawled by a search engine spider and then indexed.
Whether you are using a web design company or an
SEO company to do your site, they should know what a sitemap is and they should do that without you asking.
There are actually two types of sitemaps it is strongly advised to use.
The first type of sitemap, which is the simplest thing to do, is a web page containing a link to every page on your site. All you need to do is create a page on your site that will be called sitemap. The aim of this sitemap is multiple. The first one is for the user. Somebody that cannot find what they want on a site because the site has not been structured well or simply because it is very big, would go to the sitemap page search directly for a page name containing what they want. The second goal of such a sitemap is to help a search engine spider when it comes to visit your site. It is simply giving it a map of your site with a link to each page. The spider can then follow those links and index all your pages at once.
The second type of sitemap you would need to have is what is called an XML sitemap. Such a sitemap is only used for the search engines, and is not something a visitor would see on your site, or a page they would go to. The only way for somebody to go to the XML sitemap of a site is to type sitemap.xml at the end of the URL of the site.
With the help of Google Webmaster tool, you can submit an XML sitemap whenever you want. This will tell Google that you have either created a site or that you have added or made changes to some pages and want to tell the search engines that there is something new on your site and that they should go to have a look and index the changes.
The best thing to do to create an XML sitemap is to download a free sitemap creator that will do the work for you. All you need to do afterward is to submit the newly created sitemap to the webmaster tool.
