If you’re launching a new site, using Google Sitemaps is a must. The reason is simple - it alerts Google about your existence. Including all your pages in the XML file ensures that Googlebot will have an easier time crawling your site.

Just 10 years ago, all major search engines accepted and highly valued user-submissions. However, page spam killed the goose that laid the golden eggs (i.e. traffic). Nowadays, most of these submissions are either paid or ignored.

Google Sitemaps is a win-win solution. It allows webmasters to let Google know about new pages or sites. At the same time, it cuts down the amount of crawling that Googlebot does (refreshing only pages that have been added or updated).

Creating a sitemap for you site is easy:

1. Sign-up for an account here (if you already have a Google/Gmail account, you don’t need to sign up again)
2. Verify you are the rightful owner of the site by uploading an HTML file to your webserver’s root directory.
3. Create an XML file listing all pages and adding relevant info about them like update frequency.
4. Upload the sitemap.xml to your webserver
5. Let Google know where you’ve uploaded it

Voila! In addition to keeping track of Googlebot’s spidering your web pages, you also get statistics that are useful if you plan to improve your Google rankings. For example, if you find out you’re all of a sudden N1 for Mentos + Coke videos, you can build on that success.

Note: If you’re using Wordpress to power your blog, there’s a plugin that will create your sitemap automatically. It will also update it every time you post. Nifty!

Note: Originally posted at SmartApps