Have you found it difficult to rank favorably for the keywords important to your business? Are all of your web pages visible in the natural search results? Here are five ways Google Sitemaps can help you drive more potential customers to your site and improve the visibility of your content.

Let's start off with a quick look at what Google Sitemaps is – and isn't. Google Sitemaps is a service that allows you to submit ALL of your pages to the Google index. It's particularly useful for making sure that dynamically generated URLs or pages that are not adequately linked to on your site get indexed. By submitting your URLs in a Sitemap, you help Google's web crawler do a more complete and efficient job of crawling your site.

A Sitemap is simply a file with a list of all the URLs you want crawled on your site. You can create it manually or use Google's Sitemap Generator or another third party program.

But, it's important to note that submitting a Sitemap will not guarantee inclusion or influence your PageRank. It should act as a complement to compelling and useful content instead of a replacement of your SEO activities.

To create and submit a Sitemap, just go to https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps and sign in to your Google account (the same account and password you use for Google Analytics, Gmail, and other Google services). Type your website URL into the blank field next to "Add Site," then hit "OK". On the Webmaster Tools page, the site appears in the Site column. Click the Verify link beside the site and verfiy site ownership to see detailed statistics and errors for it.

You don't have to submit a Sitemap to use Google Sitemaps. Even without a Sitemap, you can still get reports that provide insight into your site's visibility on Google and how to make your pages more crawler-friendly. Simply sign in and add your site.

You can use the Search Engines report in Google Analytics to find out your total visits, pages viewed per visit, conversion rates, and other metrics for each of your organic keywords. What you can't see is how you ranked for those keywords. This is where Sitemaps reporting can help.

When you sign in to Sitemaps, from the My Sites overview page, click on your website URL, then click on the Statistics tab. The right hand column of the report shows how you rank organically for the top searches to your site. You can put this ranking information together with clickthrough information from Google Analytics to understand how visibility for specific keywords has translated into conversions.

Again, you don't need to submit a Sitemap to see this information. Just sign in to Sitemaps and add your site.

See common anchor words -- the common words used to link to your pages, and see the common words that Google sees on your site. Click "Page analysis" in the Statistics tab to view trends related to your site's content and the keywords that others are externally linking to your site.