HTML Site Map
Google originally developed Sitemaps, in conjunction with Yahoo. The goal of any website is to increase site visibility and user traffic. As you might know by now one way to increase site traffic is through search engine optimization. Another method is to incorporate the use of sitemaps, which allow you to specify what pages a search engine should be indexing. It can be extremely helpful to have a sitemap when you have a lot of pages, since it allows people to more easily navigate to all the important pages of your web site.
Search engines use spiders to crawl the Internet to locate pages and index them for better rankings. The crawling process that search engines use to index the Web is slow and resource intensive. Sitemaps provide a way for Web sites to specify the content that is actually being indexed for searching. If your material changes constantly, like with a blog, updating the map can prove to be helpful for webcrawlers. Google, Yahoo, and Bing highly recommend that you create a sitemap so that webcrawlers can easily find all that your site contains. Use titles for each section that are keyword specific to increase your visibility on the Internet.
Once you have a sitemap file, it must be submitted to a search engine. Each search engine has its own process for submitting sitemaps. Google includes a sitemap submission page as part of its Webmaster toolset, and Yahoo provides a free submission page for sitemaps as well. However for both search engines you must register for an account before it can be used.
Be aware of the difference between your HTML site map - which should be publicly viewable, and linked to from your HOME page, and your XML site map - which should not be publicly viewable, and which should be referenced in your ROBOTS.TXT file. You also submit your XML Site map to Google and BING via Webmaster tools.
By Marcus Howery
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