Have you a sitemap for your blog? If you don’t know, you probably haven’t, but it is one thing you can (legally) do that will improve your visibility on Google and the other search engines, and get your new posts indexed more quickly.

Very basically, a sitemap is a XML file that sits in the root directory of your blog, and is effectively a road map to your site for the search engine robots. When the search bot arrives at your site, its first point of call is your root directory. If it finds a sitemap here, it will be able to read it and then index every page on your site. This is also a great benefit if you have pages? on your site which are not easily reachable: search result pages being an example that Google gives.

The biggest plus that I have found is simply the speed with which new posts are indexed: often within several hours of posting them – without a sitemap this could be days or weeks. A bit of background: if you don’t? submit your URL to Google, it will find your site eventually, but it could take weeks. Submitting it here will speed things up, although Google make no guarantees. Once Google has found your site it will return to update, but again days or weeks can pass. By having a sitemap AND submitting it to Google here, Google will know what your site looks like much quicker, and here’s the clincher: Google will update the sitemap roughly according to a frequency you suggest: I have asked Google to update the Sitemap for new posts daily, and it does. Now, when Britney does has her next wardrobe malfunction, your exclusive photos will be indexed on the web that day, instead of 2 weeks later.

So, how do you create a sitemap? Google’s suggested generator looks a little scary, thankfully there are easier ways:

XML Site Generator: I have used this for a standard website and it works perfectly. It’s free, simply enter the URL of your site, hit generate and it will make the sitemap & give you the file for download. Simply upload the file to the root directory of your site & let Google know. I haven’t used this for my blog, because I’m on WordPress…

Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress: Simply install this plug-in to WordPress, activate, click generate and submit to Google. That’s it, it updates itself as you post, and Google re-reads it automatically. Set it up & forget it.

On Blogger? Read my post on Blogger Sitemaps.

Once you’ve submitted your sitemap to Google, you will be asked to verify it so that you can access the detailed statistics page, where you can see how much of your site Google has indexed, any dead URL’s and bad links etc. Verification is easy, you can either upload a simple HTML file as described by Google, or add a META tag to your blog. This second method is I believe, the only one available to Blogger users.

So why wait? The whole process should take no more than 15 minutes, and once indexed the payoff lasts forever.

Incidentally: Google Sitemaps are now the accepted standard for ALL search engines, so you only have to do this once.

Questions? Drop me a comment. Suggestions or corrections? Comment, or why not contribute your own article.