Sitemap general question

[swiftmed]

How exactly does a Sitemap effect your website? How effective is it?

[ThomasSchulz]

I helps crawlers find all your pages and reindex content faster

[varunkrish]

sitemap is basicially a page with links to all pages in your site.

Its meant to help users as well as search engines

[sgsmorgan]

Extremely effective and second to your homepage is probably the most important page on your site for SEO.

[hhheng]

Visit the sitemap official website: www.sitemap.org here

[MaxPowers]

A sitemap has the effect of tying all of your pages together through a single point (or a limited number of "single points"). There is an old adage from when I started with sitemaps that said "every page links to your sitemap, and your sitemap links to every page". When a spider finds your sitemap, it finds links to all of your pages.

The newer formats from Google, Yahoo, RSS, and ROR help to send more detailed and well-structured information about your pages to their supporting search engines. This information usually helps to guide their spiders through your site in an efficient manner (at least in theory, usually).

While sitemaps may not help you to rank higher all by themselves, they do ensure that your pages get noticed by the search engines quicker and more completely. Of course, if you shove a 'bad' site in their face, it will help them to notice that your site is of a lower quality faster than they would have without the maps. It is important to make sure that your site is ready for the search engines before you add a sitemap. Adding inbound links to your site from other sites will be key to ranking well!

[allout]

I was going to ask a question like this one but it is answered here. Thanks for the thread. I do have a addtional question, do you need to update the sitemap when you add pages or is it automatic?

[MaxPowers]

That depends on the sitemap tool that you choose to use. AutoMapIt does the updates for you on a regular schedule. Other tools run on your server and are controlled by a cron job, other tools run on your personal computer and are updated when you run them, other tools only run once when you request that they are created for you, other tools run when the sitemap URL is requested.

Basically, you need to update the sitemap files... how you do that has many options, but it can be setup to update automatically... if that's what you choose.

[alarik]

is http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ a good way to make sitemaps?how would you recommend?

[horisly]

there is another questiong:how often you update sitemap?

and i use the tool of "www.xml-sitemaps.com", but i don't know what the "changefreq" means? and how to set the "priority" parameter?

[judge0]

its exactly what i was going to ask .......thanks for Effective participation

[horisly]

its exactly what i was going to ask .......thanks for Effective participation

ok,i found the answer: http://adsenser.php0h.com/2007/04/03/xml-sitemap-priority-tag/