A sitemap is a simple file which contains the URLs of all the pages on your website. It is recommended to submit your site's sitemap to all search engines as it used by search engine bots to crawl your website and traverse all the links.
If you do not submit a sitemap, then there is a possibility that some of your webpages may not get traversed by serch engine at all. This is because search engine bots reach a web page only through a link and if they don't find a link to the web page, it may never get read by them!
There are several free onlin tools available to create a sitemap for your website but the problem is that every time you add a new webpage or an article to your blog, you need to manually update the sitemap on your web server so that search engines can read your new pages.
There is a quick solution available here in the form of RSS feed. Almost all websites today have the feature of distributing their content through RSS feeds and the question simply is that why can't we use it to notify the new links to Seach bots too! Yes, it is possible.
Google accepts RSS (Real Simple Syndication) 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds. Most blog software creates your feed for you. Note that the feed may only provide information on recent URLs.
To set up the RSS feed of your website as a sitemap in Google Webmaster tools, do the following:
- Log in to your Google webmasters account. Click on 'Site Configuration' -> Sitemaps.
- Click on the 'Submit Sitemap' button. A new pop up opens up asking you to specify the RSS feed address.
- Enter the address. Click submit. The URL should be a valid feed address of your website.
- That is it. Google will now automatically update the new URLs on your RSS feed and crawl them.
