A sitemap is, simply, a list of all the pages of your site. When creating a website, one mistake people make is forgetting to create a sitemap for search engines. Sitemaps allow the search engine to easily index all pages of your site without having to spider through your site and try to discover each of the pages individually. This is especially useful for any pages of the site that may not be linked from any other pages, and therefore might not be found by the usual spidering process. It is also useful when adding new pages to the site, as you can manually (or automatically) alert search engines of the new page instantly, instead of waiting for it to be crawled.

There are plugins and extensions available for most major CMSs that will automatically generate a sitemap for you. Xmap for Joomla development and XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress are two great examples. If you aren't using a CMS and need to build your sitemap from scratch, follow the sitemap protocol. If you aren't comfortable with XML, you way want to employ an XML expert to assist with the sitemap creation.

Once you have a sitemap created for your site, you should ensure that it is submitted to at least the major search engines. Google has Webmaster Tools, Yahoo has Site Explorer, and Bing has Webmaster Center, each of which allow you to submit your sitemap after verifying that you are the site owner. The search engines will then be scheduled to crawl your sitemap, and any pages that weren't already in their indices should be added. That's it! You've finished the first step in fixing your website's SEO.