Search Engine Optimization. SEO. It’s one of the hottest things in the web today, whether as a profession, as hobby, as a passion, or even an obsession. People even make money from winning SEO contests for the absurdest of keywords. If you own a website for business, you should optimize. If you own a personal blog, well, it wouldn’t hurt to optimize.

After all, about 60-80% of traffic to your site would usually come from the search engines (mostly Google, but really, it depends on your topics and keywords). And there are a multitude of ways by which to optimize your site, and basically that entails the following:

1. Making it easier for the search bots to index your site
2. Ensuring adequate/optimal keyword density for your site
3. Increasing the number and quality of inbound links

Among these three points, the first two are the easiest to accomplish, because they are on-site optimizations. This means you won’t have to ask (or perhaps coerce?) other people to link to your website, nor would you have to scour web directories, websites, and submission sites in order to submit your site for possible linking.

Today we will talk about point number 1.

There are various ways to make Google’s search bots index your site better. And we will mention a few in passing, but focus on Google Sitemaps. For one, you should ensure that your site uses properly-formed XHTML, meaning there are no broken nor missing tags. Your site should also take advantage of the title, header, and description tags. These are what come up on Google’s search results, so the more relevant your title and description are, the more searchable your site is.

As for Sitemaps, this is one simple tool provided by Google that lets you create a text-index of your website for easier crawling and submission to the Google index.

How to create a sitemap

Before you can give Google a copy of your sitemap, you would first have to create one. This file would basically contain all the URLs of all pages on your site. Google supports several formats in creating a sitemap, and this includes the following:

1. Sitemap protocol
2. Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting
3. Syndication feed (RSS or Atom)
4. Text file

The best choice would be the sitemap protocol, and the easiest is text or RSS. However, text files and RSS may be limited, in that RSS feeds generated by your website (depending on the content management system used) can be limited to the most recent updates. Text files, meanwhile, have to be manually edited.

Google has listed the means by which you can generate sitemaps, including on-server and off-server means. It would probably be best to use on-server tools, but you may not necessarily have script or shell access to your host, so you can opt to use third-party tools instead.

You can also use plugins for your CMS, which may the easier route, since the plugin should automatically update your sitemap whenever you make editions to your website.

On our next article, we shall discuss in detail how to create a sitemap for several blogging platforms, and how to upload these to Google.