what is a sitemap and how can it help me?

I have a question, what is a google site map and how does it help me and my site

 

google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html

 

A Google Sitemap is a list of the pages in your site. This helps get your site indexed. Other additions to the program can help spoterrors in your code, bad links, etc. It is helpful though if you are running a spam or BH site it may not be wise to get Google's attention like this! But for everyone else it's a good idea and does not take much time or effort.

 

I recommend using an html sitemap fo human visitors and an xml sitemap for Google.

 

if you are not familiar with xml you may find this free tool helpful:
gsitecrawler.com it creates the required google xml sitemap for you and it also has an export to .txt command that is great for creating a Yahoo sitemap. Super simple to use.

 

thank you for your responses

 

I tried gsitecrawler to upload a file to google.com/base . But google is looking for some other fields which does not come up in the output of gsitecrawler. So i manually edited and uploaded it.

My doubt is what is that bulk upload file doing ? Does it help with adwords only ? or does it help in the page listing in the google searches when some one searches using the keywords?

Thanks..

 

It helps make sure your pages are in the index so when someone does a search your pages are eligible to be found.

 

Just make a list of all the pages in your site and hyperlink them to their repctive pages. This is your site map.

You can make it look better too.
Here is the thinking point:
Google crawler crawls your website even without a site map. But it takes time.

 

A sitemap is an XML file containing a list of all d urls of ur site. It helps in getting ur site indexed.

 

sitemap is important ?

 

"Important" may not be the right word. But definately useful.

 

I think the main thing is that it helps you specify all of your pages to google in 1 go. And for you to tell google which are the most important pages on the site.
I use: http://www.xmlsitemapmaker.com/

 

sitemap page may boost the crawling speed and thus ranking effectiveness of documents at a website they do influence the crawl speed and depth, giving your documents a better chance of receiving boosts for fresh content or timely, relevant content to a searcher's query.

 

u r telling spiders abt ur pages thru sitemap n its very useful in getting ur pages crawled

 

google sitemaps are great they help show errors and bad links.

 

whats the bes way to get a html sitemap, Should you do it yourself or get a program to do it

 

Do it yourself for better results and control.

 

If you use:
http://www.xmlsitemapmaker.com/
It will give you full control of your sitemap allowing you to quickly and easily add new links, remove old and ftp it to your site.

 

The main purpose of site maps is to locate the new areas of new contents to the se spiders where it has never indexed before. Sitemaps don’t really helps in better indexing if your website doesn’t have enough good links.