You see the advertisements all over the internet, “Get your website listed on Google within 7 days, only $$$”. The fact is you don’t have to pay anyone to get listed on the Google, MSN (Live), and Yahoo. Most of the times the search engines spider will find you. But you have to be ready by having a completed website, with all links working, content based of what the website is about and including specific keywords you want to target. You can help the search engines crawl and understand better you websites internal structure by including a Sitemap.
A Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. By including one on your server you are letting the search engines know all the pages you have on your website, when the pages were modified and how often they change. You want to include two types of Sitemap, a Sitemap.xml and Sitemap.html.
A Sitemap.xml is the what the search engines will look at behind the scene. You can create a site map by going to XML-sitemaps.com input your website address and on the following page you will have your Sitemap.xml ready, download it…then uploaded to your web server. You also have the option to download a Sitemap.html, this is what the end user (human) will use to find pages on your website.
