Sitemaps
Your Sitemap Page
A sitemap is a web page that lists out links to every page on your website. Every site should have a sitemap just because it always gives visitors a way to find all your pages. Most sitemaps are arranged either by subject or alphabetically for quick reference. For an example, take a look at the sitemap for this site (link at bottom of page).
A sitemap will also help search engines find all the pages within your site--always a plus.
Submitting a Sitemap to Google
Directly from Google (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40318):
XML Sitemaps - usually called Sitemaps, with a capital S - are a way for you to give Google information about your site. This is the type of Sitemap we'll be discussing in this article. In its simplest terms, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.
With this Sitemap, you can also provide other important information about your site such as importance, last update date, and more. For this type of Sitemap, use the official Sitemap protocol so that you can submit it to Google, MSN, Yahoo! and others. You can find more information on this process at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34654&lev=answer#3. They have a link for 3rd-party vendors; out of their list, I went with XML-sitemaps.com. They are free and do a great job.
Once you have your Sitemap, you can sumbit it to the search engines by following the directions below:
Of course, with all of these, you'll need to already have your sitemap.xml created and uploaded to your web server. With Google & Yahoo!, you'll have to have an account with them to submit. The next section about Google Webmaster Tools will walk you through submitting your sitemap to Google.