Site maps are like a road map. They help to guide through our sites. There is question whether or not a Google sitemap is necessary. Google sitemaps are different than a normal site map your would have for your visitors. A Google sitemap is a raod map for Google to find and index pages within your site that otherwise may be difficult to find or take a long time for the crawlers to locate.  If a site is well structured within the guidlines of Google it may not be imperitive to have a site map but for a site that is brand new it is a great way to help your pages get indexed.

There are several formats for submitting a Google site map. These include .rss, .txt, and .xml are three ways to format a site map. In my opinion an xml file is the best way to submit the site map. Below I will lay out the format for an .xml file.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset
<url>
<loc>http://yoursite.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2009-11-20T03:02:43+00:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>1.00</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

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