What is a site map? How to create a site map for a blog?

A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.

XML is a coding language used as the standard for webcrawlers to find and parse sitemaps. The instructions to the sitemap are given to the crawler bot by a Robots Text file.

Since Bing, Yahoo, Ask, and Google use the same protocol, having a Sitemap lets the four biggest search engines have the updated page information. Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled, and being crawled does not guarantee indexing. However, a Sitemap is still the best insurance for getting a search engine to learn about your entire site.

Search engines use automatic crawlers, why use sitemaps? Answer to this question should lie within you. If search engines crawl automatically, they take a long time to do so. They may take few days to few weeks depending on the search engine. But if you use sitemaps, the page gets indexed within a minute, that’s many times faster than automatic crawling done by the search engines.

This can help build your ranking in search engines.

Sitemaps contain all the links to all your pages in your website or blog. They also have the information about their post date, the date when they were last updated and all such related details. Some sitemaps also have the feature to add priorities to different pages,etc. This instructs the search engines to take this page more seriously than others.

When I had submitted my first sitemap at Google it didn’t help me for 24 hrs. Then the sitemap got submitted. Google webmaster showed the no. of URL’s submitted.

Source : http://wikipedia.org

Register with google webmaster first

1. Go to Google Webmasters Tool and login with exiting gmail account. 
2. Now add your Blog URL as shown below.

3.   3.     Now you will have to verify your site. It’s very easy. Just choose verification by meta tags.

4.       4. Now you will be provided with unique Meta tag. Copy Meta tag. 

5.       5. Now, login to your Blogger account. Then navigate to your Blog Layout-->HTML

Now, just try to find section in your Blog template. Add the meta tag, below  section.

6.       6. Now, go back to Google Webmaster page and click on Verify.

Submitting a blogger Site to google.

1.    Open up your web browser, and type in your Blogger blog’s URL.

2.    At the end of the URL add robots.txt.

For example, if the URL of your blog is http://myblog.blogspot.com, then enterhttp://myblog.blogspot.com/robots.txt

3.    Some text should now be displayed in your browser. Look for a line that starts with Sitemap:. The URL after that label is the location of your sitemap.

Using the example above, the line would look like:

Sitemap: http://myblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

4.    Back in Google’s Webmaster Tools, the domain name part of the URL would already be included, so you would just need to specify the feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated portion of the sitemap URL. If other sites are able to accept a sitemap, then you may need to include the entire URL

Or

In the case of blogspot, just add /atom.xml to the end of the blog URL. (For example, the site feed URL of this blog is http://gyandope.blogspot.com/atom.xml.) Then click "Add Web Sitemap" and you are done.