Should I have a Google sitemap for my website?

A simple way to improve your website visiblity on Google is to setup a Google Sitemap.

When Google indexes your business website, it might not always find all of the pages that you have available on your site. A google sitemap helps Google find all of you webpages, including the ones that it might not have otherwise been discovered.

To setup a google sitemap is easy. Just follow these simple steps:

1. Create a sitemap.xml file. This can easily be done at any number of online sitemap generation websites.  One such site that I have used is www.xml-sitemaps.com – just follow the instructions on the site, and it will create an xml sitemap for you.  Also, here is a link that Google supplies to a list of more sitemap generators:

http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators

2. Save sitemap.xml to your website. Save the newly createdsitemap.xml file to your website using your favorite webpage editor, such as Dreamweaver, Ultra-Edit, etc.

3. Submit the sitemap to Google. Go to google.com and login in to your account (if you don’t already have a google account, create one – it’s free!). Then select the Webmaster Tools from your Account area. Click on the Sitemaps tab and submit your new sitemap.xml to Google. Be sure to give it the full path to where you saved it on your site. For example “yourbusinesswebsite.com/sitemap.xml“.

That’s all there is to it!  Be sure you login into your google account in the next day or two and double check that no errors occured when google tried to read your new sitemap.  And, be sure to create a new sitemap and resubmit it to Google each time you make any major revisions to your site content or when you add new pages. This will let Google know to schedule a new crawl of your website to check for any new content changes you have made. Here is a link on Google where you can learn more:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tour/tour4.html

That’s it for now. Thx, talk soon!

Betty Walker, Founder & CEO
CyberCompany Solutions, Inc.
http://www.ccstechpros.com
bawalker@ccs-email.com