Site Maps for SEO

I've never used a site map. How effective is it in terms of SEO? Does anyone recommend a specific site map builder or tool? and Finally, are they difficult to set up?

Thank you so much for your time.
Joe

 

Setting up a html and xml sitemap of your site would be advised.

www.xml-sitemaps.com takes the legwork out of setting them up.

Also, it can depend on what type of site you want to create a sitemap for. Some forums have hacks which create sitemaps for them.

 

Thank you very much. i will gove it a try.

best regards,
Joe

 

Sitemaps have yet to show any bonus or gain for SEO purposes.

All it will insure is that all the sub pages of your site get spidered. Which should happen already if you know how to make a site.

But it takes about 2 mins to do so why not..

 

I disagree. With large sites such as forums, which have many deep links, making Google aware of all of the URL's is very valuable.

 

FYI.. in my head i am totally thinking Google Webmaster tools for uploading a sitemap.xml

An onpage sitemap is very good for allowing the spider to easily find your links.

I am sorry i mistook the question.

 

My site is rather large in terms of number of pages. Do site map builedrs allow you assign a higher priority to certain directories or do Google bots scan through all of them equally?

 

google scans from top to bottom.

 

Within the sitemap you can specify which of your pages are (relatively, compared to the other of your pages) more important than the others. importance should be something between 0 and 1.
Anyway, it takes a long time (weeks to moths) until google starts to obey your rules fully.