More webmasters are becoming aware of the need for having Google sitemaps to get their site listed quickly and efficiently in Google. While this has caused a recent rash of Google sitemap creation tools, most focus on the Google sitemap alone while ignoring other extremely useful formats. Most webmasters never pursue the power of the Yahoo sitemap, the HTML sitemap, and 'forget' to update all of their multiple sitemaps frequently.

HTML sitemaps allow all of the search engines to spider all of your pages, but this is often the most overlooked format. Search engine spiders do their thing by scanning your HTML pages and following the links from those pages. This cycle continues until all pages are scanned... in theory. Imagine all of the pages on the internet, and even with the best hardware, search engines have problems keeping up with every website. They have to do something to shave a few seconds off their day here and there. One way they limit their time on any one site is to only scan so deep into a site.

When Search Engines reach your homepage they follow the first set of links. From these pages they follow the next set of links found and so on until they have spent enough time on one site then continue on to the rest of the web. If they haven't found all of your pages within the first few passes, they move on until they return at some point. One common strategy for the HTML sitemap is to have every page of your site link to your sitemap and for your sitemap to link to every page of your site. This creates a very spider-friendly atmosphere that allows them to find all of your links quickly. Keeping your HTML sitemap up to date allows every Crawler out there to find your newest pages quickly.

The Yahoo sitemap format has been around a while and is much simpler in format than Google or the HTML format. Yahoo only asks for each URL of your site to be on a new line in a plain old text file on your server. It is easy to use Yahoo's URL submission page to enter the URL of your Yahoo sitemap and get them to look at your whole site. Once submitted, Yahoo comes to check on your sitemap and begins crawling your site in it's entirety.

Using the Yahoo, Google, and HTML sitemap formats, you can be assured that your site will have the best exposure possible in the search engines and your traffic will not be limited to what you get from Google alone. There are many search engines out there and all of them offer you traffic. If you are concentrating on Google, you may lose the other engines where your competition is gaining ground.

One of the biggest hassles of growing your website is keeping all of your sitemaps up to date. This is a monumental task to perform by hand and while there are a growing number of Google sitemap generators out there, only one service offers a single solution for all sitemap formats with zero risk of 'forgetting' to update your sitemaps regularly. Whichever solution you choose to make this task easier on you as a webmaster or SEO professional, be sure to cover all of your sitemap formats and get the maximum exposure for your website.

Shawn Snarski is the creator of http://www.AutoMapIt.com AutoMapIt is the first complete sitemap solution for webmasters and SEO professionals. It is a membership based system that spiders your website like the Search Engines do, uploads 4 sitemap formats directly to your server, allows for complete customization of your files and the information contained in your Google sitemap, and runs on a regular basis updating your site with no need for you to remember to make the update happen.

AutoMapit is a free, ad-supported service with optional upgrades to remove ads and increase your update schedule. I created the Free account on this managed service because every website can benefit from using this service. Once you see how good it is, you'll want more!

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