Do you use sitemaps?

First of all, what is a sitemap? A sitemap is a file that contains a list of all the web-pages of your website.

What is it good for? It tells the search engines about all the pages that are available in your domain and it informs them whenever you add new page(s).

The result? More of your pages will be indexed and the search engines will send you more traffic.

The good thing is, creating a sitemap is easy, it doesn’t cost anything and it shouldn’t take more than a minute to create one (there are even scripts that handle the process of creating the sitemap and informing the search engine(s) automatically whenever you add a new page – zero work for you).

On the other hand, don’t expect all of your pages to be indexed immediately after creating a sitemap. Actually, some of your pages might never get indexed – even with a sitemap in place.

But as I already mentioned, it doesn’t cost anything, it doesn’t really require any work and it will surely give you some additional visitors and customers – for free!

What’s next?

Here are some resources to get you started with sitemaps:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ – this is a free service that allows you to create sitemaps for Google, Yahoo and other search engines online.

http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final – this is a great plugin for WordPress Blogs. It automatically creates and updates your Google sitemap and informs Google for you.

http://www.google.com/webmasters – Google Webmaster Tools to manage your sitemaps

There are also tons of other services and tools, but the ones listed above are a good starting point ;-)

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