The number of websites in the world has surpassed 1 billion. This translates to 1 website for every seven people. This has resulted in competition for rankings in SERPs because every website owner wants to be found. Your site’s visibility first depends on the content, which then has to be crawled. This is a bit tricky if you have so many pages full of information, which makes it difficult for Googlebot spider to detect what should be indexed on your site. It is for this reason that Google sitemaps were introduced, which are basically text files with lists of web addresses of all the pages contained on your website.

Technology is making life easier, better and enjoyable. Owning a website is nolonger a reserve of the few with technological know-how. In fact, anyone who can use a MS word can now own and even manage a website without any support from the tech-savvy fellows. This is the good news, but here is the bad. Because everyone can create and own a site, there are currently far too many websites in the world; in fact, a billion to be precise as at October 2014. Most of these websites are very active, and fall under common niches. Large numbers are synonymous with competition, and in this case, all sites are competing for search engines’ attention. If you have the content online, it has to be found by the search engines so that it can be availed to web users.

If you are still unconvinced on why you need to create and submit sitemaps to Google and other major search engines, you just need to realize that you are losing out on a great opportunity to maximize your site’s potential. Initially, most webmasters and website owners cited the complexity involved in creating sitemaps, but that shouldn’t be a reason anymore. Today, you can make good use of any of available assortment of sitemap makers to have your sitemap neatly generated, fast and reliably. Also, you don’t have to pay a penny submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and Bing because it is free.