An XML Sitemap is a tool that you can use to provide Google with information about a website. It is not the same as the sitemap you add to your website to help ease user navigation. It's a comprehensive list of all the pages on your website. Submitting a Sitemap to Google, MSN, and Yahoo insures that they're aware of ALL the pages on your website, including any URLs that may not be found through their standard crawling process.

Creating a Sitemap doesn't guarantee a high ranking in the search engines, but it will ensure that your website is crawled and indexed, and will also allow you to verify it.

A Sitemap also lets you inform the search engines which of your website's pages are important, and how often to crawl them, depending on how often you modify your pages. The search engines like this because they don't have to visit any web pages that haven't been changed.

There are a few ways to submit a site map. To submit to Google, go to your Webmaster Tools when you click on the "submit a sitemap" link. To submit to Yahoo, log-on to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit and click on the "Submit a Site Feed" icon. MSN doesn'tt have a formal submission process, it's done in the Robot.txt file instead.

Before you begin the submission processes, I recommend you use a program called Inspyder Sitemap Generator. You can go to their website and download a free copy. Once you've launched the program, enter your website's URL, click on the checkmark, and specify which pages you want crawled. You can also indicate the importance of certain pages, and how often you expect the pages to change. Next, click to create your Sitemap file, and save it. Then you'll need to upload this page to the root of your domain. For example: yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml. When you've finished uploading the xml file, follow the directions we just discussed for submitting to Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

Here's the link for Inspyder Sitemap Generator: www.inspyder.com