A sitemap quite simply put is a log file which maps out the entire structure of a website, listing all the links with in a website, date the pages were last modified, the web pages priority within the whole website, and the frequency at which the webpage is changed.

The file is stored on your web server usually under the file name sitemap.xml.

Sitemap and the Google Search Engine.

Recently Google setup a feature called Google Sitemaps, which allows webmasters to monitor everything going on with their web pages within the Google search engine network and quickly inform them of any changes which have been made to your website structure.

The webmaster sets up a Google Sitemaps account, giving access to the Google Sitemap Control Panel, then has to verify they are the owner of the website by uploading a blank file with a specified file name issued by Google, once verified the webmaster can simply create a sitemap using the Google Sitemap Tool or one of the many free third party ones. Upload load the newly created sitemap.xml file, and inform Google via a single button click that the sitemap.xml has been created and ready to be crawled by the Google spiders.

The Google sitemaps is still in a BETA phase of development and getting any results in the control panel takes qui

te some time, but once the info starts flooding in, you are able to monitor: keyword searches that return results from your site, keywords that users click through to access your site, crawl stats for pages which have been crawled successfully, crawl stats for pages which have errors, page rank for each of your website pages, pages which have been indexed, pages which are linking to your site and checking that your robot.txt file is operating correctly.

Conclusion

All in all the Google sitemap feature can be a very useful one especially if you have a large website which has difficulty in being crawled or you are continually adding more and more pages therefore the website structure is continually changing. Being able to inform Google quickly and simply that your website has changed and needs re-indexing is surely to be popular to all webmasters who use this utility.

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