Inside Google Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps is a program that lets any site developer publish a map of their site and submit it to Google for indexing. It's designed to let companies guide Google's crawlers and should help get pages indexed more quickly and thoroughly.



The program is free, and given the importance of Google traffic to most sites, it's worth taking a look at how it works and what tools are available to support it.



Why Sitemaps Matter



It can be frustrating to see how long it takes for web pages to get indexed at sites like Google. If your pages don't show up in Google, you're probably losing out on traffic and sales or advertising revenue.



Sitemaps are a way to help Google index your site. While Google says that this won't raise your page ranking, it may mean that your site gets more traffic, simply because your pages are more thoroughly indexed.



Google has published a case study on Sitemaps looking at the experience of Interactive Sites, a developer of web-based products for the hospitality industry. The company found Sitemaps easy to implement, and effective at increasing traffic to their sites.



According to John Blayter, Interactive Sites' Director of Engineering, "We were incredibly impressed with how easy Sitemaps was to integrate into our CMS." Blayter and his team integrated Sitemaps into the company's CMS in a single day and placed it on 60 client websites.



Interactive Sites' implementation of Sitemaps improved both the coverage and freshness of content in Google's index. Since implementing Sitemaps, the company's clients have benefited from an average increase of 125 percent in the number of indexed pages - and in some cases more than 240 percent.



For many companies, an increase of 125 percent in the number of pages indexed could result in a big jump in site traffic.



What are Sitemaps?



A Sitemap is an XML file that resides on your website that is updated regularly with any changes and additions to your site.



The file is in a fairly simple format. In Sitemap XML files, the main element, urlset, encloses a collection of URLs. For each page on your site that you want to include in the Sitemap file, there is a url element with one required child element, the loc, which is just the page's URL. So, in its simplest form, a Sitemap is just a big list of the URLs at your site.

There are also several optional child elements for the url element, lastmod, changefreq, and priority:

* lastmod indicates when the URL was last update

* changefreq indicates how often the page is typically updated

* priority indicates the importance of this URL relative to the other URLs at your site.

Tools for Supporting Sitemap

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