I know you’ve heard all about Google site maps. But if you were like me you only thought they would be useful for large complex sites. I have recently learned this is not the case.

Several months ago I started doing some SEO on a new client. They had the website up for a little over a year and Google never indexed past the first page. After checking for html errors, creating a sitemap page in the site, being sure there were text links to the interior pages and adding many links to the site, after a few months Google had still not indexed past the first page.

In frustration I went to Google and added a Google site map. With the many sitemap generators around this was very easy to do. With in a week 5 of the 7 pages on the site were indexed. This lead me to try some of my other sites that had pages missing from the Google index but have been indexed by MSN and Yahoo for quite a while. In each case the number of pages indexed by Google greatly increased. Not a cure all for the indexing problem but this seems to have greatly helped the indexing as well as the number of pages that now show in the SERPs.

Even though I am now sold on doing Google sitemaps on all of my sites, I have found some of the other information provided in the sitemap tool to be equally useful. Other useful tools include the crawl stats and the page analysis. You can use other sites tools to do similar functions, but I find it interesting to know exactly what Google is seeing. This has lead me to remove instances of certain words on my site so that they so not rank as highly in the “Common Words” list. There is also a side-by-side comparison of the frequency of words used to link to your site verses the common words on your site. It would seem logical the closer that these two match the greater that that word is considered relevant to your site.

If you haven’t checked out Google’s free tool, I would recommend signing up and trying one of your sites to see if it works for you. Google Sitemaps