Hi! There is no way I can make a sitemap for my site... how important is it? I would say goolge indexs 3/4 of my pages anyway... ?
Just make a page with a directory of the pages on your site. Link to it on front page and you should be fine.
I think a sitemap is not important, but does help google find all your pages. Why not use a sitemap generator?
http://www.publishersweblog.com/blogging/10-things-bloggers-forget-to-do/ like that shows, many people forget about sitemaps. They are not exactly the holy grail of traffic building and THE main SEO technique. But it is essential. Having a sitemap makes life easier for sites like google index your site quickly. its about time more than anything. Sites like google breathe on sitemaps. most sites get indexed within 24 hours anyways but usually its a good idea to have a sitemap. Like you said google will index 3/4 of your pages but what about taht 1/4 page. That could mean relevance to someone else and that reduces your traffic just as much by 25% just if you use that example. In a real case, you would loose about 5-8% traffic which is not that much for most. But if you are using any advert proggies like adsense, that extra click could be taken away from you that could be that difference between payday this month or payday next month.
Now a days sitemap is important and its easy to build. it help google to find all of your pages at a time.
If you have new website it's importance but for the old one it 's not importance but It 's good to submit sitemaps ,Why not try http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ then you can creat your own sitemaps.
Linzi, what problems are you facing specificly? If you are encountering problems generating a sitemap, I suggest you try A1 Sitemap Generator
I also vouch for the sitemap. Google and other search engine spiders are always crawling your site if you update frequently. If there is a sitemap installed it makes it easier for them to find new stuff.
site map will make your site to get easily crawled by spiders. If you need one, there's some site map generator you can use. Its easy to create one though.
They are very important and I would highly suggest you make it a regular habit to update and resubmit your sitemap to Google to make sure your new pages are added. Plus, the Google Webmasters site where you submit your sitemaps contains other useful bits of info about your site.
I've been very happy with http://gsitecrawler.com/. It is fairly fast, easy and best of all it's free.
In my opinion Google site map is not important at all, they've indexed more pages when i didn't have a sitemap.
Same here... My site had more then 700 pages indexed before I made a sitemap... As soon as I submitted sitemap, it dropped to about 300 and is barely going up for the past few weeks... Not sure why, perhaps because I did not include pages that I thought were less important. But still, it said that the spider will still do the same job as before, so that was unexpected.
Well, a sitemap is what a spider sees. This is in case your web site has a complex navvigation system or using JavaScript or AJAX. But a sitemap, and maybe an automatic PHP script to create one whenever you update your site, in combination with a robots.txt will improve your crawling and spidering efficiency. Try this and look at your results in 3 months. The problem with lowered results in Google may have been as a consequence of supplementing the rest of your pages. Seek out some robots.txt and sitemap guides and try again.