An XML Sitemap is a fiie designed specifically to communicate with search engines on a programmatic level. The XML Sitemap is a directory for the search engine crawler to learn about all of the URLs on your website, where they are, how often they are updated, how important the various pages are, and much more.
The XML Sitemap is your opportunity to tell Google exactly what you intend for Google to discover about your site.
Based on the information that Google learns from your XML Sitemap, Google will decide which pages of your site are relevant and might be useful to people searching. Google will then index those pages, storing them in the Google index.
The Google Index is like the difference between having your contacts stored in your phone vs having to look them up in a phone book.
The more pages from your site that you can get into the Google index, the better.
Sitemap Configuration:
It is important to make sure that your XML Sitemap is properly configured. This means that your sitemap should dynamically update itself. For example, each time you add a new page of content to your site, that page should automatically be added also to the sitemap.xml and it should also contain the time and date stamp from the time that it was published. The specifications for the XML Sitemap protocol are available at sitemaps.org
Sitemap Submission:
Submitting the sitemap to Google is controlled through Google Webmaster Tools. Bing and Yahoo both have similar interfaces to submit a sitemap. Most SEO companies that are claiming to do “Search Engine Submissions” are really just doing this. It also doesn’t need to be done more than once, unlike some would have you believe.
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