The submission of an XML Sitemap to the major search engines is one of the basic tasks for a Page with a good search engine preparation.

Every webmaster knows that story: we polished the contents, create links, index, tag, and yet the Google index does not want to respond to the article. Whatever the reason - from slow web servers to non-compliant HTML - many factors can contribute to the search bots unhappiness - you should not forget to submit an XML Sitemap in the Webmaster area at www.google.com.

There are quite a few tools to generate sitemaps (or at least keep you waiting for one). What has been most reliable so far is http://xml-sitemap.com - in the basic version for free, up to 500 pages to be indexed. This is how the site map creation works:

• register Your URL on www.xml-sitemap.com
• Wait up to 1 hour until the Crwaler fnishes its task - you get some status updates every now and then
• After the downloadlinks to sitemaps in variuos formats shoow up, pick one and download. I choose the compressed
  

  sitemap.xml.gz

• Upload the sitemap via FTP directly into the root directory of your website
• Go to http://google.com/webmasters and give them the URL to ypur sitemap: Caution: The site map must be in the root direectory of your own website, other paths are not accepted.
• Then you have to wait a couple of hours or days, until the file is actually pulled and handled by Google. You will get a statusupdate in the webmasterarea about this

Another tip: When you open the map in the local web browser you get a quick overview of all the URLs of your website. Errors with directories, umlauts in URLs and unsystematic URL aliases can be corrected easily.