Sitemaps have been one of the most underestimated search engine optimization commodities employed on the internet. Sitemaps are fundamentally an atlas to one's site showing all the sections and sub-sections, its structure and interlinking of one's website in a simple and lucid manner at one place. What sitemaps do in this way is make website navigation very simplistic for searchers and search engines alike. What is the key here is that it's an important instrument that can be used for enhancing SEO. Sitemaps have been in operation for a long time in standard HTML format by popular portals like Yahoo and MSN. Not in any way being a novelty, one must consider a separate sitemap for spiders and another for search engines for optimization benefits.

• In addition to search engine visibility, sitemaps also play the role of instant informant to search engines about any alterations that have been made to a website. Even though it's not immediate, it's much slower for a site that doesn't have a sitemap at all.



• A sitemap can even be implemented before developing one's website. It makes the job much simpler when one knows what pages he has to create and its layout.



• The reliance on backlinks is greatly minimized when one has a good sitemap; simply because search engines now have a much stronger source, the sitemap to work with to index your site. Also a sitemap helps you to publicize shady or orphaned links with relative ease; however it's much better to fix broken links and errors than completely rely on sitemaps.



• Popular search engines like Google use special formats to index results on the basis of sitemaps and its constantly trying to improve its algorithm by the day. If not now, when their algorithm improves, more and more sites with strong sitemaps will get indexed sooner or later.

On one's technical forte, one can exercise two ways of building sitemaps - to employ online sitemap generators or download one from the internet and install it on your PC. The latter being more painstaking, it gives you control over your output. However, there are plenty of free online tools available on the internet that lead to sitemap plug-ins and generators which helps in discovering accurate requirements. Once the ideal sitemap is ready, it must be uploaded and informed to Google. With complete and specific verification that the website belongs to you; one can proceed to open a Google Sitemaps Account.

Currently, MSN or Yahoo do not proffer XML formats, but will definitely do so in the near future to compete with the algorithms of Google. It is highly probable in the near future that sitemaps will be the standard that must be tendered to search engine for indexing.