Google caused quite a flutter when it released its Sitemaps in the summer of 2005. The Internet has been a happier place to haunt since, especially for the Webmaster and his search engine optimization goals.

To go into some technical jargon, the Google Sitemaps are XML documents. But the crux of the matter is that the Sitemaps are comprehensive listings of the entire content of your website. These sitemaps can be prepared by Googlebot, Google?s proprietary software that sifts through the entire content of your site, evaluates its importance and relevance and decides on an appropriate rank for your web site. If this is the case then you will also get a fair idea of what your site is worth in Google?s eyes.

On the other hand, the Webmaster himself can prepare a Sitemap for his site, wherein he marks out the relevancy of each section so that Google can actually do a better job of ranking your site according to the parameters that YOU think is important and will get you noticed in the web traffic.

To fully comprehend the oodles of good that Sitemaps have wrought in, take a trip down memory lane. Think of the times before Sitemaps were so flexible as to allow you a considerable say about your website.

To elaborate, say your corporate website is going aboard the Net. In the pre-Sitemaps days, when Googlebot evaluated your site content on its own discretion, there were chances that the wrong page went up the rank ladder. For instance, Googlebot found the name of your company in all the right places in the ?Contact Us? page, deemed it the most crucial part of your website and hoisted it up the ranks, so that surfers saw this page when they put in the name of your company as the search word. But you would have ideally wanted the ?About Us? page to top the charts. But how on earth the poor Googlebot would have known?

With the improved version of Google Sitemaps, you can have Google dole out scores according to the importance you attach to the pages of your web site. Thus when you mark your ?Feedback? page a paltry 0.2 on a scale of 10, you can be sure that Googlebot won?t have it flashed when somebody keys in the name of your company or its location. When you define the Sitemaps yourself, you can be rest assured that the ?Our Clients? page carrying your score tag of 8.2 will get a higher ranking.

The Google Sitemap comes as a revelation for the Webmaster who can now hope to reap the benefits of Search Engine Optimization to a hilt.