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LEE ODDEN: What are site maps and how can they influence your search engine rankings? Well there's a couple of different kinds of site maps you should be aware about. The first kind of site map is an HTML site map. It's basically a web page on your website that shows a collection of text links to all the important web pages. That way, when Google, for example, finds your web site on a natural call, it can find all the important pages and include them in its index. Same thing for Yahoo, same thing for MSN. The other kind of site map is where you can actually create a list of url's and actually give it to Google. You can do the same thing with Yahoo. Both Google and Yahoo have webmaster programs that allow webmasters to create these lists of url's, submit them directly to Google, directly to Yahoo, and actually give you feedback as to whether those url's were crawled properly or not.