The Importance of Sitemap to Websites and Search Engines

Sitemap is the graphical representation of a website’s architecture. It is like a book’s table of content: sitemap contains all the accessible webpages within a website; Basically, it provides a “communication channel” between the search engines and the website. Sitemap help search engine spiders to crawl and index the inner pages of a website. A sitemap can be either any kind of documents (usually, it is in XML or Text format; mainly for search engine spiders only.) or another webpage listing all the existing webpages of a website (beneficial for both human users and search engine spiders.) Asides from the benefit of helping the search engine crawl the inner pages much faster and easier, it is also beneficial for websites which are using or made up of flash; also for those websites that has dynamic contents / pages.

You can generate sitemap for your website using Sitemap Generator. With this sitemap generator, you can download the uncompressed XML sitemap, the sitemap in HTML format, and the sitemap in text format; which later need to be upload to your website. Then, your website are now ready to submit to major search engines through the following links (you need an account for each search engine webmaster tools):

Google Webmaster Tools – http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
Yahoo! Site Explorer – http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
Bing Webmaster Tools – http://www.bing.com/webmaster/

Just follow the step-by-step process in each webmaster tools; then, you are done submitting your website to Google, Yahoo, and Bing. (if you have problem submitting your website to any search engine, don’t hesitate to leave  comment here and I’ll do my best to respond immediately to your questions)