What is a site map? A site map is a collection of URL's of every web page on your website, laid out in a list. Generating a site map for your website is actually a pretty important step in doing proper search engine optimization, and is often overlooked by amateurs.

The reason most people don’t create one though, is because they want to do it manually, and for a website that has thousands of pages it is darn near impossible. That is where a site map generator comes in and does all of the work for you.

A site map generator is basically the same website crawling robot that all of the search engines use. It starts off on your home page, and follows every link to every page, until it has visited them all. It then takes the URL’s of all those pages, along with the page title, and puts them in a site map dot XML file.

This file can be uploaded to your websites root level, and then submitted to Google, Yahoo and MSN so they can just visit the site map file and grab and add all of your pages to their search results. Using a site map makes sure that the search engines index every page, and find out about it as soon as possible, which means you will be added sooner.

Most site map generators can also make an HTML site map for your visitors to visit, and see all that your website holds on a single page, or spread out over several pages. Not many visitors will use your HTML site map to get around, but it is sometimes nice to have so the search engines can also look at it.

If you are looking for a great site map generator that I myself use, check out the XML site map generator to learn more about their handy little script.

One thing you should know about site map generators, and search engines in general, is that they can only crawl what you link to. If you make a page on your website, upload it and everything, but don’t connect it to another page, then it is just a lonely page that nobody can find, not even a web bot!

So for the site map generator to work correctly, and to get better search engine rankings with more pages included, make sure you always keep every new page connected to another page that is already indexed in the site map.