Use Sitemaps to Increase Pages Indexed in Search Engines

Here is a rundown of different sitemap file formats and when to use them for quick indexation of your content.

Google sitemaps / XML sitemaps
“XML sitemaps” were originally invented by Google. Later on more search engines like Yahoo, Bing and Ask followed and together they all created the shared standard XML sitemaps.

Using XML sitemaps allow you to submit your entire website with all its pages to search engines. this will help them index your content faster (in particular if you make sure not to have lots of duplicate content etc.) and getting more of your website pages into search engine result pages. Google has since then introduced some new XML sitemap formats for specific kinds of content. In particular the following deserves special attention:

News Sitemaps
Image Sitemaps
Video Sitemaps
Mobile Sitemaps

If your website lends itself well to these kinds of content, you should create the necessary sitemaps for optimal exposure in search engines. Here is one sitemap generator tool that can handle all XML sitemap file kinds.

HTML sitemaps:
These are the standard good old way of createing sitemaps. They help:

Visitors find important pages in your website.
Give link juice to important pages you search engines to crawl.

Remember that you can create HTML sitemaps in any tool or server code language. The output is what has to be XHTML or HTML. Doing that, both browsers (with real humans behind) and search engine crawlers can read them.

ATOM and RSS Feeds:
For blogs, forums and related kinds of websites, you will also want look into RSS and ATOM feed files. Many search engines and news aggregation services allow you to submit feed files. These will help you get new pages and posts indexed the same way, if not faster, XML sitemaps do.