Today’s hint or website suggestion contains two of our favorite things:
“free” and “improve web traffic”. I sat down this week and started what seemed like a gigantic task, to create a website for http://www.PikesPeakAtlas.com with close to 100 pages to it. While working on this I also started to consider how to get Google to see all of it in a timely fashion. Google loves sitemaps, but sitemaps are NOT written in conventional HTML usually, so I went looking for a site that could help.

XML Sitemaps - usually called Sitemaps, with a capital S - are a way for you to give Google information about your site. This is the type of Sitemap we’ll be discussing in this article.

In its simplest terms, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website.
Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.

http://www.makeasitemap.com was just what I was looking for. It was super straight forward, gave me the simple options that I needed. Of course two of my favorite things about it is that it is FREE and WEB-BASED, no software to download.

This bookmark suggestion comes from:

Pete Van Vuren
http://www.pikespeakatlas.com