I'm starting up my site and I was wondering how effective are Google sitemaps feature. I tend to upload the file via the Google Webmasters tool, but I really can't tell how effectual it is. Also, is there a way to enhance the sitemap to better optimize the site? Thanks.
Xml Sitemap is not effective to gain traffic! So,there is not point to try to show a connection between the number of URLs in a sitemap and Alexa traffic report (most of all if it is from Alexa!). It's only a tool to help Search Engine to reach for your URLs in order to index them. It just helps the process of crawling the site. Nothing more. You will also have to be patient. Google takes time to index the URL they think are relevant to them, and they won't index everything. Now, obviouly if you have zillion of URLs, then you will have zillion of visitors, this is quite common sense. I guess it's not your case right now.
salty crackers, your image looks impressive, but i tend to agree with webricko. i think it's just to get your pages indexed more properly...
If you want to disregard the added traffic that comes to your site, which is shown by the graphs above, than ok. Analytics spiked in Google traffic right after I put in the sitemaps. It continues to do so, and the traffic from Google is increasing exponentially at the same time frame as the sitemaps were added to web master tools. So let me explain it again, we didn't use Google Webmaster tools. When we started using it our traffic went up. It's obvious by the analytics graph that there was an increase in traffic through Google because of this. If you don't sitemap it up, your pages don't get indexed properly. When they are indexed more people find your site through the search engine. When they are NOT indexed people will NOT find your site easily through Google because there aren't going to be many indexed pages. Do you think a site with 200 indexed pages is going to get the same traffic as a site with 500,000 indexed pages? The whole point in indexing your URLs is so people can find your site through Google and you get more traffic based on this.
I had experienced before when i setup my blog without sitemap. It takes time for the blog to be index . But when i setup another blog with sitemap, it took less time for it to be indexed.
A sitemap will always help in the fact that it provides links to pages that search engines may not readily, quickly find otherwise, as well as a necessary tool any website should provide to users, not just bots.
I never knew how to create and submit a Google sitemap. How does it increase traffic back to your website or blog? Sometimes I feel stuck on stupid. And , don't laugh at me too hard, because I'm fairly new to the internet...
Here's some XML sitemap tutorials. Explains how to create, upload, submit and ping XML sitemaps to search engines (each thing links to its own tutorial)
Salty Crackers it is a really impressive screen shot. However many in the discussion have complained how traffic is related to sitemaps. With out any doubt Sitemaps helps the Search engine bot crawl your website with ease. It is the single most important thing to have apart from PageRank sculpting(different issue) if you have a big site and you want deeper level pages indexed. Sitemaps help bots in crawling alone and not indexing. It is the search engines themselves who decide what to index or not so the traffic graph which you have placed might not look apt to many.(Webricko and chinesechess in this case). But there are many pages within a huge site which in spite of being worth indexing don't get that status because of poor site architecture. This causes lack of URL indexation and further possibility in lack of traffic. In this way sitemaps can have affect on traffic. So overall everyone must agree that sitemaps give bots good chances for deep URLs to get indexed and also will affect traffic indirectly.
I also see that you show Alexa as proof but in my opinion Alexa isnt reliable. It is easy to trick Alexa and do fraud with it, not saying you do but the hole system is just not trustfully. A sitemap is just like it says a map for the searchengine his spiders. It helps them finding the pages which normally wouldnt be found as result of your bad infrastructure on your website. There are plenty of major websites without sitemap but because of their good structure they dont need any. So a sitemap is just a tool nothing more, directly it has no influence on more traffic.
Why is there even a debate about it? It takes less than a few minutes to do, and Google recommends it. What's the problem...
On a really big site, they can be helpful to getting your pages indexed. On sites under about 100 pages they don't seem to make much difference.
You only really need a sitemap for search engines (.xml) if you are struggling to get pages of your site indexed or if your internal link structure is not particularly great. This is the only purpose for this kind of sitemap so in most cases, it is not even needed. You can of couse build a sitemap for users (.html/.php) where the aim is to help them navigate the site more easily and locate what they are after.
sitemap had not direct connection but indirect connection bcoz once u r page index, its start getting rank and traffic start.
Yes,I agree with you,Site map is important for a site who are not index in search engine.Like google.