Run, Don't Walk to Google Sitemaps!

Web designers, start your engines . . . The Google Sitemaps service introduced on June 2, 2005 appears to be a way to insure that Google "crawls" and indexes all of your web pages, and, improves the chances of Google finding new content and updates quickly. As Martha Stewart would say, "It's a good thing!"

The way Google Sitemaps works is pretty simple. You place a XML formatted file on your webserver which instructs Google to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed. Whenever you make changes to your website, you accordingly update your sitemap. And Google will also help you create this file using a script called Sitemap Generator - It can be configured to automatically create Sitemaps and submit them to Google. Sitemap Generator can create these Sitemaps from a URL list, access logs, or a directory path hosting static files corresponding to URLs.

Whle it is in beta testing at present, any web designer or developer concerned about search engine optimization should head straight to Google and join this groundbreaking program!