One thing is for sure, Google has definitely been reaching out to webmasters lately. Over the next few weeks I’ll examine what I believe to be the most useful Google tools for webmasters. Today: Google Sitemaps. If you have a website that you’re trying to optimize for search engines, you need to have a sitemap. Better yet, a Google-specific sitemap.

First of all, what is a sitemap? A sitemap is usually a single XML file that contains a list of the pages on a website and outlines the website’s structure. Sitemaps have been around forever now. You use to see them in HTML form, but now webmasters are taking advantage of XML.

Sitemaps can either be written manually or generated automatically. Unless you have a four page website, you probably don’t want to manually type a sitemap.xml for your website. Luckily, there are many tools for automatically generating such files. Google offers an official sitemap generator, however it’s a bit tricky to use and requires you to have Python installed on your server. Just Googling the phrase brings up some decent solutions.

For WordPress users, there is an even easier solution - a simple Google Sitemap Generator plugin. The plugin allows you to fully configure the output file, and installation is easy. Just extract to your Wordpress plugins directory and enable it from your admin panel.

Google is pretty good at automatically finding things like sitemaps. However, it would still be a good idea to submit the file manually to ensure they keep an eye on it. You can login to Google Webmaster tools with your G account to add websites/sitemaps to your profile. Google will give you a complete error and query report every time it crawls your sitemap!

The best part about sitemaps is that it lets you decide the value of your pages. For example, with my blogs I always give the highest priority to my homepage and the second highest to my posts. The pages get the next priority, archives, and so on. Setting a priority for your pages will not effect your PageRank, but it tells Google where they should focus their resources and what pages to crawl most often.

If you blog, or administer a website, but you don’t have a sitemap, you’re already behind.