Google Supported Sitemaps

One of the best ways to tell Google about your website is to submit a sitemap. It is usually one of the things that your SEO service should do to for your site if it has not been done already. Essentially, it is a list of urls that you want to be crawled by Googlebot. The most common type of sitemap is an XML file. However, Google supports  sitemaps for their other services including:

• XML Sitemap files for web pages – Use these files to submit all of your web pages (this is the preferred format for web pages). While not all search engines may support the Sitemap types listed below, the XML Sitemap for web pages is supported by all search engines of sitemaps.org.
• RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds for web pages – Many blogs create these automatically.
• Text files with web page URLs – If you can’t automatically create one of the above formats, you can create a text file with your URLs in it.
• XML Sitemap files for Video Search – Videos on your website can be indexed and made available for Google Video Search.
• Media-RSS feeds for Video Search – mRSS feeds are used by various other systems, we can use these for Google Video Search as well.
• XML Sitemap files for Google Code Search – If you make programming samples or code available to your users, you can submit these for Google Code Search.
• XML Sitemap files for mobile web pages – Using this kind of format allows us to recognize content that has been optimized for mobile devices (please note that there was recently a small change in the format).
• XML Sitemap files for geo-data – If you have geographic data on your website in the form of KML or GeoRSS files, please let us know about these files.
• XML Sitemap files for News – News websites can submit their news content in this special Sitemap format (please note that you must first register with Google News before these files are processed).

The sitemaps can be submitted in the usual way using Google Webmaster Tools.