Adding an XML sitemap will definitely help search engines to crawl your website faster and more effective

Best practices SEO Tips by Pieter Gussenhoven

2. See how powerful a site map can truly be!

Page rank is relative and shared throughout a website by a unique and democratic voting system created by Google. I could spend hours trying to explain how Page rank works, but what it comes down to is having efficient and easy access navigation throughout your site. That is where a site map page comes in. Since every page on the website will be linked directly to the site map, it allows web crawlers (and internet users) to quickly and easily find content.

So, by placing a sitemap file on your website, you enable Google and other search engines to find out what pages are present, which have recently changed and have them spider your website accordingly. Using site maps allow you to inform and direct Google and other search engines like Yahoo and MSN Live Search what content you have available on your Website.

An example:

A site map helps to dig up deep content on websites: It used to take 4 clicks to get to a product page at www.questinc.com. By creating a site map, users and search engines can now access any page on the site with only 2 clicks. The Page rank from these deep pages went from 0 to 2 in about 3 months and the ranking went from virtually not existent to number 1 almost across the board for nearly 2,000 pages on their site!

So, how to add a site map to my website?

4 easy steps to get it done on www.xml-sitemaps.com/

1. Enter your full website URL and some optional parameters in the form;

2. Press 'Start' button and wait until the site is completely crawled (the progress will be indicated);

3. You will see the generated sitemap details page, including number of pages, broken links list, XML file content and link to a compressed sitemap. Download the sitemap file using this link and put it into the "public_html/" folder of your site;

4. Go to your Google Webmaster account and add your sitemap URL. Please check About Sitemaps for more details.

Good luck!