How exactly to provide Google with the sitemap for your website?

Now that you know the importance of the sitemap, maybe you want to submit a sitemap to Google so that its crawlings miss none of your pages. Most search engines accept general HTML, text or the ROR sitemaps, but Google has its own standards. AuditMyPc.com provides a free service of google sitemap generation that abstracts your site into a sitemap.xml in the schema of Google Sitemaps (BETA). It is presented as java applet with easy to use interface. Follow me in 16 steps, and lead yourself to your own sitemap.

1. Click http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp to open up the instruction page of the Google Sitemap Generator, and respond to your browser's warning for java applet with yes, if any, until you see a clickable image on the right side of the page, looking like:
   
   
   
   
2. Click it to launch the AuditMyPc.com's Sitemap Builder.
   
   
   
3. Type your website URL and make necessary changes to the default options as you like. In most cases, leaving them as implied will be OK. For more information of robots.txt and robots meta tags, please visit http://www.robotstxt.org/ .
4. Hit the Start crawling button to initiate the process and switch to the Crawling panel so that you can monitor the crawling.
5. Switch to the Site map panel, make sure the "xml" is checked for Output format, and click Save.
   
   
   
   
6. Now that you have a sitemap.xml, transfer it to your hosting server and put it directly under your domain, that is http://www.yourweb.com/sitemap.xml, and browse to http://www.google.com/webmaster .
7. Proceed with Site status wizard.
8. Type in the URL of your website and press Next.
9. Proceed on Take me to Google webmaster tools.
10. Sign in with your Google account if not.
11. Click on the domain you just added, or add it again if it doesn't appear in My sites.
12. After the click, you should be taken to a small information portal with 3 tags, Diagnostic, Statistic, and Sitemaps. You can easily debug the problems your sites' suffering from with the search engine of Google here, for now, let's go to Sitemaps.
13. You can now provide Google with the sitemap you just generated with AMP's Sitemap Builder, by clicking Add a Sitemap.
14. Choose Add General Web Sitemap.
15. Specify the URL of your sitemap.xml, http://www.yourweb.com/sitemap.xml and click Add Web Sitemap.
    
    
    
    
16. Done! You have submitted your sitemap.xml to Google successfully, and it will help it index your site more effectively!
    
    
    

Other search engines offer webmasters the opportunity to provide a sitemap, too, such as Yahoo! and MSN. Sitemaps can be provided in HTML, text, and XML. Go check 'em out!