No longer is it sufficient to just have good advertising copy, a good headline, and to place the advertisement in the local paper or TV station. Not only must the website/advertisement meet all the requisite criteria for success, but now the advertiser must figure out how to get THEIR advertisement read.

Anybody with a computer can put up a website, but to get people to visit that website, and perhaps make a purchase, requires more. There are literally thousands or even millions of websites offering the same thing that you offer. In order to make your website stand out, one thing you can do is use the techniques of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Search engines are important to an internet business because it has been estimated that about 85% of website visitors arrive through a search engine listing. Performing some sort of search engine optimization to a website will enable search engines to more efficiently find, index, rank, and present all the websites floating in the vast sea called "Internet".

There are many possible techniques involved in search engine optimization, such as proper use of meta tags, use of valuable content laden with keywords, and linking from relevant sites to name a few. One other technique is the use of a sitemap. The more pages your site has, the more important a sitemap becomes.

In its simplest form, a sitemap is a listing, or catalog, of all the pages on a site, together with their links. A link to the sitemap should be placed on the index page at a minimum. A sitemap may be simple links, or may be a description of the page with the link.

Commonly, there are two particular types of sitemaps, although others may be used. The XML structure is really directed at search engines. It is a series of clues to search engines such as Google as to the structure of the site. The search engine's spider will then follow the links on the sitemap, gathering data about each page in its normal manner. A sitemap laid out in HTML format tends to be more for the sake of humans and often contains descriptive text in addition to the links. For these reasons, you may encounter sites that contain both types of sitemaps.

A well-constructed sitemap serves two purposes:

1. It allows a visitor to look at the entire layout of the site and perhaps more rapidly find the page that addresses his or her concerns.

2. It allows search engine spiders to more rapidly and completely access, index, and evaluate all the pages of the site. This can contribute to a higher site ranking in some cases, and, at the least, provides more possible pages to lead the visitor to the site.

While a sitemap can be constructed using basic html, there are free sitemap builders or generators available. These can be found simply by performing a search under one of those terms.

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