When it comes to your existence on the web, you can’t leave anything to chance. This is especially true when it comes to ensuring your content is indexed and added to major search engines. With billions of sites out there and millions showing up every week, you can’t assume Google or Yahoo will index your site at all, let alone in a timely manner.

The best way to make sure every page you publish is indexed is to be proactive and tell Google whenever you add something new. If Google is in the loop, all the other search engines will follow (and in most cases beat Google to the punch). Not only that, but at the same time, why not tell them exactly the URL they need to read in order to find your new content?

The best way to do that, is to build yourself a sitemap (aka an index file of your entire site and the url to reach every page).

Lucky for all of us, Google provides an amazing set of tools to help you do just that. Google Sitemaps is one of the many tools available to webmasters as part of the Google Webmaster Toolkit. A Google sitemap is really nothing more than a very simple XML file showing Google where all of your content is and the URL they can visit to index it.

 A Look At Google Sitemaps

To create your own sitemap, it really doesn’t take much programming skill. You simply follow the specification outlined on the Google Sitemap website and fill in the appropriate sections. If you are using a content management system such as Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, or Nuke, then you won’t need to do any programming at all due to the wide variety of plugins and addons already available for each platform.

By adding a sitemap, you ensure that all of your articles get maximum exposure to search engines. An added bonus to adding your sitemap is the huge array of additional tools that Google provides to help you analyze your content. For example, with Google Sitemaps you can view things such as which of your pages have the most external links or which keywords are most popular for bringing traffic to your site. You can even see a list of external links to your site, which is my personal favourite.

A Look at Google Sitemaps

There is really a plethora of useful applications available to you through Google Webmaster Tools that can really help you to analyze your traffic and make sure your content is in all the major search engines. After all, without Google Webmaster Tools, I might never know that we average rank number one for the search term "fuzzy sheets" or number 6 for the term "I think I love You."