It goes without saying that finding your business’ website occupying a top spot on Google is a bit like hitting the jackpot.

According to Nielsen//NetRatings, 46.2% of all online searches were made using Google in July 2005. Comparing this with Yahoo, the second most popular search engine at 22.5%, the profit potential of a high Google listing becomes that much more apparent.

In this article I’ll explain the basics of Google Sitemaps - a relatively new Google feature that promises to greatly increase the odds of getting Google to crawl your website.

While simply being crawled by Google is no guarantee of a high page rank (many other search optimization factors apply such as optimizing your pages and creating inbound links), not being crawled at all is a 100% guarantee of never being ranked. Google Sitemaps goes far in clearing this first hurdle.

Google Sitemaps Overview
Traditionally, after submitting your website to Google, Google's crawler - Googlebot - eventually seeks out and crawls all linked pages on your site. Once a page has been crawled, Googlebot periodically returns to check for updates. Shortly after each of Googlebot's visits, Google updates its index and recalculates the ranking of your pages.

This procedure has proven less than optimal for Google and site owners in that Googlebot uses an enormous amount of
computing resources crawling the Internet looking for pages that *may* have changed. These resources and the time Googlebot wastes looking for potential page changes means delays in crawling new websites and recalculating the ranking of pages that *have* changed.

Google Sitemaps resolves this problem by offering a method to exchange information on new and modified content in a timely manner. Both sides benefit: Google saves computing resources and bandwidth costs while site owners get their updated content listed sooner.

The Basic Process
The Google Sitemap submission process is remarkably easy and requires no programming knowledge or additional software. In addition to Google’s own Sitemap Generator, there are many other free online tools available to build your Sitemap. I list a few of these a little later. Here’s how the Sitemap process works:

1. Using Google’s or another Sitemap tool, the owner compiles a list of site URLs and adds a few optional attributes (date of last modification, priority and change frequency) to each URL entry. To receive Google’s highest priority, this list must be an XML file and must be named 'sitemap.xml'. This file is uploaded to the site’s root directory (the same directory as the homepage).
    
2. The site owner then registers with Google at https://www.google.com/webmasters/Sitemaps and submits the URL of the Sitemap, e.g., http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml.
    
3. Google now verifies that the individual submitting the Sitemap is indeed the site owner. This is done by requiring the creation of a new verification file with a unique name such as GOOGLE13e5849324c7364e.html. This new file is also uploaded to the root directory - the same directory as sitemap.xml.
    
4. Google then checks for the existence of the verification file and verifies the validity of the sitemap.xml file. Once accepted, Google schedules a crawl using the information provided. Shortly after each download of a Sitemap, Googlebot revisits the web site and fetches new and modified content.
    
5. If site content changes significantly, the site owner generates a new Sitemap and resubmits it to Google (step 2 above).

Sitemap Tools
In addition to Google’s own Sitemap Generator (Python 2.2 or higher must be installed on the web server), three of many other online Sitemap generators are:

• Tarrant.it Sitemap Generator
• PortalApp Generator
• Autositemap

More Sitemap tools are listed at http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

Sitemap Tags
When generating a Sitemap using any tool, it’s important to enter:

1. When a page was last changed
2. The anticipated periodicity of future page changes
3. What priority Googlebot should give that page when crawling your site

This information is communicated to Googlebot by means of XML tags contained in your sitemap.xml file.

To illustrate this, consider the following sitemap.xml example. Don’t let this intimidate you; it’s automatically generated by whatever Sitemap tool you use.

Last Modified or <lastmod>: <lastmod> tells Googlebot when a page was last modified or created and enables Googlebot to only consider fresh content and not waste time crawling old content. Changes in this tag should trigger a Sitemap resubmission.

Change Frequency or <changefreq>: <changefreq> denotes how often you expect the page in question to change. In many cases this is an educated guess but do give it your best. Valid entries are: "always", "hourly", "daily", "weekly", "monthly", "yearly" and "never".

Priority or <priority>: Assign a reasonable <priority> from 0.0 (the lowest) to 1.0 (the highest) to all your pages. Googlebot will crawl high-priority before low-priority pages. A high priority should be given to pages that change frequently and are of greater interest for your site visitors. Assign low a low priority to static pages such as contact forms, archives, etc.

More Information
For more information on Google Sitemaps, see the official Google Sitemap guide at
http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

The Bottom Line
While obtaining a high Google ranking for your website depends on many factors, none of these matter if Google doesn’t know your site exists. Google Sitemaps is designed to allow Google to discover your site amongst the estimated more than 8 billions other pages out there.

This is one search engine optimization tool that is long overdue and one that every online business owner can profit from.

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