Sitemaps, does it really make a difference?

[st_hart]

Upon submitting a website to Google, we are encouraged to include it's sitemap. Does it really make a difference to help Google bot crawl it? What kind of website need to get submitted with sitemap? Do we also need to make sitemap for a simple blog hosted by blogger?

[jimbo]

You should basically have a XML sitemap for any time of website so that the search engines can be sure to find all the pages of your site.

[billmcintosh]

For any self hosted website that you host on your own domain name you should make an xml Google sitemap.

If you have a blog at blogger you don't need to worry about it.

[jimbo]

I use Xsitepro for nearly all my sites and that website builder creates a xml sitemap automatically.

[smontano]

If you have multiple web sites (or even just one) and you are trying to make it easier for "spiders" and or "crawlers" to approve or rank your site then a Site Map is imperative to have. This will please search engines and make it so much faster for your site to be reviewed. Just make sure to use links that are created as "plain text links" so it is not difficult to view. Another good tip is to break it down and organize your site map into categories. Just another way to make it more user friendly. Of course just like anything else online it is good to have very descriptive content and to use anchor text links. This will not only place links all over your site but also keep the search engines and readers happy with useful unique content. There are several other tricks regarding using a site map but I just wanted to share a few tips to get you started with a "Good" Site Map for your website.

[wohlfman]

It's been recommended to me to use an XML site map for the robots and HTML for humans. The HTML needs to only focus on pages that are important, no need for every page.

[dahark]

They make a huge difference my friend.

Sign up with the big three, and im not talking WW2 LOL history Joke
Google, MSN, Yahoo, they all have decent webmaster services that enable you to upload your site map. There are plenty of on-line sites that can do it for you and 3rd party software that will create site map for you. I think it is important to submit every page in a sitemap, but the oness with a lot of text are crucial, as search engine will be lookig for those crucial keywords that occur in your site. With site maps you can also set the priority of individual pages, on a scale of 1 - 0 , 1 being the highest, telling the crawlers which are the most important pages on your site.

With regard to actual site map for visitors yes only keep it to top level hierarchy maybe some secondary pages, but don't forget this site map will be index to so it can be hand to make sure its easy to access, and all the links are working/ correct. A good idea would be to put in a footer on your homepage and subsequent other pages.

Another point with site maps, submit the feeds, RSS and ATOM to key ones especially if your page is constantly changing you want to make sure these spiders are constantly checking your page.

[dahark]

Well a little bit of an update on how useful sitemaps are i created a site about a week ago and i submitted my sitemaps to google and if you type DAHARK into google you should see Dahark come up as #1 hit

SITE MAPS DEFINITELY DO HELP