A Google Sitemap is an easy XML document that lists all the pages in your website, but the Google Sitemaps program is really much more vital than that. In fact, the Sitemaps program provides a little glance inside Google's mind - and it can tell you a lot about what Google thinks of your website!

Why Should You Use Google Sitemaps?...

Until Google Sitemaps was released in the summer of 2005, optimizing a site for Google was a deduction game at best. A website's page might be erased from the index, and the Webmaster had no thought why. Otherwise, a site's content could be scanned, but because of the habit of the algorithm, the only pages that would rank well might be the "About Us" page, or the company's press releases.

As webmasters we were at the whim of Googlebot, the apparently arbitrary algorithmic kingmaker that could make or break a website overnight through shifts in search engine positioning. There was no way to communicate with Google about a website - either to understand what was wrong with it, or to tell Google when something had been restructured.

That all changed about a year ago when Google released Sitemaps, but the program really became useful in February of 2006 when Google modernized it with a couple new tools.

So, what exactly is the Google Sitemaps program, and how can you use it to progress the position of your website? Well, there are essentially two reasons to use Google Sitemaps:

1. Sitemaps provide you with a way to tell Google valuable information about your website.

2. You can use Sitemaps to learn what Google thinks about your website.