I love when I can see immediate results from my efforts. I assume most people are like that. So I was thrilled when I found that a site I was working on suddenly jumped into the search engine rankings - from out of nowhere. No, it was not magic - it was the sitemaps I generated, uploaded and submitted to the major search engines.

This happened to be a site we did not build or plan. So we inherited some problems in the architecture. Furthermore, it’s a brand new site - just went live last week. I could have just chalked up the no-show in the search engines to the sandbox or the slow spiders . . . But I knew something was not right. The easiest and quickest recourse, rather than trying to find the problem in the code, was to test out how effective Google sitemaps is. The answer? VERY!

The sitemap was uploaded yesterday and already this morning, the rankings were appearing. We always include sitemaps on our sites,  but in this case, we were dealing with a site we did not build and we knew had some problems with the Googlebot. So it was a perfect chance to see how the sitemaps can help a site get crawled. For more information about sitemaps, visit, http://www.sitemaps.org/.