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Many elements go into building a good website. A Website should look good,be informative, be stable and work with a variety of browsers. Ultimately, however, the true test of a Website will always be one thing, "does anyone see it?" The internet is a rather large place and grows larger every day. No matter how great your site is, it is still only a small part of the Internet as a whole. It is like the proverbial needle in the haystack, moreso a needle in a needlestack. How then, will people find your site?

These days, people find information on the Internet using search engines. We're not talking tens or dozens of search engines, in all seriousness there are three - the rest can be ignored. Google, Yahoo and MSN hold a majority of the searches, with Google in a steady lead. If you can make your site show up at the top of the search engine results, particularly Google's, it is sure to be seen by many people. Making your site show up at the top of the search engines however is a much larger topic than can be discussed here . This is a topic large enough that many people have even based their whole careers on helping sites get to the top of the search engines. We will, however, be discussing a great tool which can help you as well. It is called Google SiteMap.

Google is the most powerful of the search engines and it is vital that your site be listed there. By itself Google handles about 30% of all internet searches. At almost 1/3 of all internet searches this is an impressive number. Google also supplies their information to AOL search which handles about 18% and many smaller, lesser know search engines. This means that by doing well on Google you can target almost half of all internet users.

In order to get your site listed, Google must copy the contents of your site to their database. This way Google "knows" what information is available on your site. Once your site is in its database it can choose when to bring your site up when its visitors search for related terms. There are far too many sites out there for anyone at Google to manually enter them all, so the process of getting your site into Google's databaseis done by a computer program called a spider.

Because a spider is not intelligent the way a human is (though spiders are much smarter than humans in some ways), it can sometimes be difficult for the spider to find all of the pages of your site. This is especially true with dynamic sites where the same file may pull different data from your Website's database. Essentially, Google Sitemaps is an easy way to guide Google's spider through your site, to make sure that the pesky robot doesn't miss anything important.

In its most basic form Google Sitemaps is just a file which lists all of the individual files that make up your site. The files are listed by their full path with each one on its own line. This file is placed where Google can access it. Google's spider then periodically checks it for new pages and sends any it finds to the spider. Google Sitemaps can also include more detailed data such as how often a file changes. For this purpose one must create an XML file which contains the necessary information. This way you can request that Google's spiders visit a frequently updated page more often.

Setting up a Google Sitemap by hand could be somewhat of a burden. They are not difficult to create but would have to be updated each and every time a page is added, removed or moved. Google has made automatically generating a Sitemap easy by offering a computer program (in the form of a Python script - for you technical people) which does all the work for you. It is even possible to set the script to run automatically so that you do not have to think about running it yourself. There are also many similar tools available on the Internet which can do the same.

Hopefully this has given you a glimpse into the Google Sitemap, a worthwhile toll which is easy to add to your site(s):

To begin, just go to http://www.google.com/webmasters and create an account. Google will give you an access key.

You will need to create a blank file in your webroot. This proves to Google that you really do have ownership of the site. T

hen create your sitemap file, either by hand or using one of the many tools available.

Lastly, go back to the account you created with Google and submit the URL of your sitemap. You can sign back in later and view a report which explains what if any errors were encountered in your sitemap so that you can fix them.

Hopefully this article has been informative and will help you to make your site all it can be. Creating a Google Sitemap can be a great first step in gaining traffic and bringing your site to it's potential.