ive read in alot of places that a Sitemap is important to include in your site for good SOE. Can someone explain if/why this is so? and Just how should i be setting my sitemap up, cos just about everysite i see seems to have a different idea of just how a sitemap should look?
you will able to talk with googlebot with your sitemap . you will give a list of your pages to the googlebot with sitemap . you can use gsitecrawler for making sitemap . gsitecrawler is also making yahoo urllist.txt
I am not sure why but I know for my Joomla powered site , as soon as I added a sitemap my hits increased from 5 to 6 a day to about 30 a day. i dont know if it got indexed more or what but it was the only change I made
it is helpful to tell google about all of your pages linked in your website listed in sitemap. IN my opinion it is very useful for new website for quick indexing.
When i released my site, it helped me a lot by getting all pages indexed more quickly. I especially like that you google shows you how it sees your site and its content.
okay so a good sitemap is important.. but how should it be setup.. cos everysite map i see seems to be different. if its mainly for the benefit of the google robot, so long as it says "sitemap" in the header and in a few <h1> tags, then just a plain list of hyperlinks to all the different pages of my site is the best way to go? I really don't like that tho cos it tends to look ugly.. but if i start making it look fancy will this get in the way of what the robot is looking for?
well, i just use this one XML sitemaps and that's it. Sitemaps is a powerfull group of tools/resources. check this also: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=241474
I agree. Use a sitemap generator, its quick and easy. I doubt it helps you rank better however it does index all of your pages resulting in more website hits.
What if you have a site with like 20 sections and 1500 articles....should you sitemap everything and display it as a link on your menu? that page would be freakin huge?
I had setup the sitemap mod on my OSCommerce store and to test it out I created a static page that was not directly linked to anything (set it up just for testing purposes). The mod automatically creates the sitemap and then pings the google server (I manually added the extra page to the sitemap XML). I then noticed about a week later after reviewing by links crawled by google that the extra page was indeed crawled. So.. although this doesnt really help determine whether or not it is of high importance.. it does indeed help.
sitemap is one of the very important and strong factor of on-page SEO. if you want google to love your website u must have a sitemap in webmaster tools. hope u understand what em saying