A sitemap is a way of organizing a website, identifying the URLs and the data under each section. Previously, the sitemaps were primarily geared for the users of the website. However, in 2005 Google adopted an XML format designed for the search engines, allowing them to find the data faster and more efficiently.
At this time, all of the major search engines have adopted Google’s standard.
Through the XML protocol, search engines could track the URLs efficiently, optimizing their search by placing all the information in one page. XML also summarizes how frequently a particular website is updated, and records the last time any changes were made.
XML sitemaps are not a tool for search engine optimization and has no impact on ranking. It does, however, allow search engines to make more accurate rankings and searches.
A sitemap would be saved on your server as: http://www.yoursitename.com/sitemap.xml
To create your xml sitemap and keep the search engines informed of changes to your site you need a sitemap generator. There are a number of sites that will create one for free, but I’ve been using this one:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/index.php
A site without a sitemap is an invisible one. An invisible site doesn’t make money. That’s sad.
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