A sitemap is a visual or textually organized model of a Web site's content that allows the users to navigate through the site to find the information they are looking for, just as a traditional geographical map helps people find places they are looking for in the real world.

A sitemap is a kind of interactive table of contents, in which each listed item links directly to its counterpart sections of the Web site. Sitemap helps a search engine to index the website content more faster.

Having a sitemap is an optional thing but it is always advisable for a website to have an updated sitemap whenever the website content is changed. Generating sitemap for small website is easy but for website with thousands of web pages, it becomes a difficult task to generate an updated sitemap regularly.

To help webmasters solve this problem, Google webmaster has developed and launched its official Google Sitemap Generator (Beta) Tool. This free tool can be installed on your server and it will create sitemap for your website. This tool is different in lot of features when compared to the existing third party sitemap generator tools.

The features of Google Sitemap Generator are as follows

• Ping to Google Blog Search for new or modified URLs.
• Generates Mobile Sitemaps for mobile-friendly websites.
• Generates Code Search Sitemap.
• Generates XML Sitemap.
• Find new and modified URLs based on web server’s traffic.

In case, if you are a Blogger user, read this article on How to Create Sitemap for Blogger.

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As we know, the existing Google Webmaster Tools had support for 26 languages but recently, Google extended its language support to 40 by adding support to 14 new languages. The new languages that is supported are Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Filipino, Greek, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Latvian, Portuguese (Portugal), Slovak, Slovenian, Serbian, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

Now the total list of languages that are being supported are itemized below along with their universal code.

Arabic (ar)
Bulgarian (bg)
Catalan (ca)
Traditional Chinese (Taiwan) (zh-TW)
Simplified Chinese (zh-CN)
Croatian
Czech (cs)
Danish (da)
Dutch (nl)
English (en)
English UK (en-GB)
Filipino (fil)
Finnish (fi)
French (fr)
German (de)
Greek (el)
Hebrew (iw)
Hindi (hi)
Hungarian (hu)
Indonesian (id)
Italian (it)
Japanese (ja)
Korean (ko)
Latvian (lv)
Lithuanian (lt)
Norwegian (no)
Polish (pl)
Portuguese (Brazilian) (pt-BR)
Portuguese (Portugal) (pt-PT)
Romanian (ro)
Russian (ru)
Serbian (sr)
Slovakian (sk)
Slovenian (sl)
Spanish (es)
Swedish (sv)
Thai (th)
Turkish (tr)
Ukrainian (uk)
Vietnamese (vi)

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The Google webmaster team has prepared a very good 22 minute video presentation, which gives tips on how to improve your site’s presence on Google search and how to deal with issues like image search, fluctuating PageRank, duplicate content etc.

The presentation slides used in this video can be downloaded from Google Docs.

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