Sitemap

[youtube]

Is a sitemap really that important or can you essentially do without it if you have your navigation links set up very well?

[wilber]

Always have one. No matter how good you think your navigation system is there will always be someone out there that will be lost.

[youtube]

Yeah, I've been adding them especially since I learned that Google really likes you to have one for indexing the site.

[swingerman]

Hello,

All sites have to have at least two kinds of sitemap: one for the visitors and another for search engines.

Both are inportant, but the search engine sitemap is the most important.

One of my sites has a large database and has around 300 000 dinamically generated pages.

I designed text based navigation to let search engines find and index all the pages.

Google has indexed around 3500 pages that time.

After I've read googles advices about sitemaps, and realized, that the sitemaps are like news feeds. As soon new link, title available, google starts to crawl it as soon as possible.

So I've changed my dynamic sitemap to contain all the dynamic pages of my site.

Three things happened:

- the bandwith usage increased thanks to googlebot
- google indexed 20 000 extra pages in couple of weeks
- My visitor traffic increased because of the large aount of indexed pages

Conclusion:

Search engine sitemaps are essential SEO tools, search engines discover and index new pages faster with sitemaps and you can get more visitors.

Webmasters! Search engine sitemap is important! Take it serious!

[magpie2419]

So what is the best software for creating a site map??

[swingerman]

Since I'm a PHP developer I create my sitemap myself. Actually my stite creates the sitemap itself. I suggest for everybody who got always changing site such as news or blog site to spend an extra time to make a sitemap generator script.

In my case the script called sitemap.php. I've submitted it to google as sitemap.xml. An .htaccess directive redirects it to sitemap.php. It was neccesary in my case because my site's structure. The script outputs a sitemap or sitmap indexes generated from the database.

Like this the sitemap is fresh every second. As soon as I insert a new item in the database, it is availble in the sitemap.

If you are using a software to generate a sitemap, you have to generate a new one every time you add new content to your site after you have to upload it.

[geek]

Do you have an example to show us of what you are talking about Swingerman?