One of the most under-used SEO tricks for Google Search Engine Optimization is a Google Sitemap. Not to be confused with your typical website Sitemap with links to all your different pages, a Google Sitemap is an .xml file usually named sitemap.xml and uploaded to the root directory of a website.

The purpose of a Google Sitemap is four-fold. At the base level, a Google Sitemap let’s a webmaster communicate with Google‘s web crawlers. Second, a Google Sitemap should map out all the different pages and URLs of your website in order of most important to least important. Finally, a sitemap will allow you to adjust the importance of each URL as well as the frequency of communication with Google.

Sitemaps, while highly helpful to SEO, are widely considered by most as a pain in the rear and not worth doing. SEO experts will abruptly disagree with those foolish claims. Google has Sitemaps in play to reward those who take the extra time to talk with everyone’s best search engine friend, Google.