Many people wonder if it is worthwhile to take the time and effort to create and xml google site map, in the hopes of it improving their ranking or quality score with Google.

For most of us small business owners, we do not have access to the hosting server to put the Google software tool on to do it automatically, and some of don’t know xml from an xray.

But there is hope!

I personally have not submitted a full-fledged site map. However, there is a way to get your site spidered by Google quickly and easily, at least once a week. My site is spidered daily, actually, I think because I have an RSS feed at it. But that is a topic for a different post!

So how can you ‘talk’ to Google more often?

In your free GMAIL account, there are various free tools. One of the tabs, Webmaster Tools, has a way to VERIFY your domain with Google by putting a small piece of code in the metatag on your homepage.(Look on the top left when you are logged in to gmail and choose account if you want to see a full list of all the things Google offers for free within Gmail. One you get to the next screen you will see an icon that looks like a group og computers in various colors.)

Once you verify your account that, you start getting great reports on what people are not only searching for, but clicking through on, the top 20 for each, and what you rank on for each of these terms as well.

It also shows all your internal and external links, pages, and most important keywords. It also shows me the exact date and time since I was last spidered.

It is a completely free tool. Ever since I started using it about a year ago, it has been getting better. Now it gives more and more reports, most of which you can download as CSV files.
The reports give you the knowledge of what people are REALLY searching for, and what is bringing them to your site. You can break it down per country as well, and they will be adding countries as they get their new offices set up in China, Singapore and Australia.

They also have mobile search as well, so as I said, the kinds of reports they are adding help me to create more products that I know people are interested in. How do I know? My weekly reports are tellling me.

The tools and reports are all easy to use, so I would recommend anyone set up a free gmail account, request a verification code, copy and paste the code, put it on their homepage in the metatag (the instructions are very clear) and once the account is verified, your site profile results will start coming in.