A sitemap is set up to know the web site's position in the search engine listings. It will not bring in thousands of new visitors overnight but it is important count in the toolset. This article will improve your search engine position in sitemaps.

What is a sitemap?
Sitemap refers to two different things.
1) Many large web sites create a visual sitemap which can be used by visitors for quick navigation.
2) But this article is about how search engines like google are used to index your site.

Why do you need a sitemap?
Google, yahoo, msn and other search engines can see your site even if you don't have a sitemap.

There are four advantages of having a sitemap:
1. If your site uses non-HTML links like the JavaScript menus it might be complicated to track these links, because of which all the pages will not be found.

2. A sitemap tells which sites are more significant and which are less to the search engine. This prevents the less significant pages from contending with your own pages in the listings.

3. A sitemap helps the search engines in knowing which pages on the site are updated more frequently. This enables the search engines to show the current data in the important pages and to ignore less important pages.

4. A sitemap tells the search engines when you have updated your site's content. This makes the user to find the new pages more quickly.

There are three different things to notice about each entry:
1) LastMod: try to tell the search engines the date and time when you last changed this page. This will tell them which ones they ought to index right away, and which ones they can ignore.

2) ChangeFreq: if the sitemap is not updated frequently, this will give an idea to the search engines as to how often they can check each page.

3) Priority: this tells the search engines as to which pages are important. On a scale of 0.0 to 1.0 determines which pages are very significant and which are less important in your site.

It's very easy to know which pages in the site have least importance. Some examples are privacy - contact us - About us

It is not that the privacy policy page is not important. Privacy policy page can be taken for granted. But for search engine purposes, it is important to direct them to the pages where you actually do your business.

There are a lot of software tolls that will create a sitemap by reading your site's content. The results have to be adjusted according to "priority" settings. Search the web for free tools like the sitemap generator, sitemapDoc, XML-Sitemaps-AuditMyPC Google sitemap generator.

The three important things that have to be done are:

1) The root directory of the web server has to be placed in the sitemap file and the main index file. Each time it is updated, place the new copy there.

2) Notify the major search engines of the new sitemap file each time it is updated. For Google submit it from within webmaster tools.

3) Place a reference to the sitemap file in the robots.txt file as Sitemap: http://www.freelancesubmit.com/sitemap.xml. Through this the search engine will find it, even those that you did not submit it to directly. This has to be done only once, unless there is change in the name or location in the sitemap file.

Once the sitemap is created and submitted you must maintain it. Every time a page is added to the website, in sitemap also it has to be added. Each time a page is updated in the website the "lastmod" setting has to be updated in the sitemap. Try adjusting the "priority" of the pages from time to time to see if it improves the performance of that particular page. And each time it is modified in the sitemap, resubmit it to the major search engines

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