Hello all! This is my first post on this forum -- and Im glad I signed up here --- because Im just about to submit my mockup for my 1st website to a web developer ---- and realized I didnt have a sitemap, and was wondering the importance of sitemaps Can anyone explain to me why (or why not) sitemaps are important in SEO? Thanks in advance!!!
Does it make a big difference to your search engine positions? I've never bothered with them but maybe I should..
Search engine positions won't be good, except for crappy search terms, until your site is out of the sandbox (5 to 6 months). Submitting a sitemap will get your site crawled quickly, and indexed shortly thereafter.
The Sandbox? -- I keep hearing that term (Im new to SEO.... I started heavily researching just a few weeks ago --- but im online till about 5am learning haha) What is the sandbox?... is that a period of time that new sites have to wait to get on the engines ----- like SEO Purgatory??
Pretty much - except it's not so much a waiting period to get listed, it's more of a waiting period before your site will appear in decent positions for targeted search terms. There is even a subform about the sandbox here.
you may aswell make a sitemap it takes like 2 mins and nothing to lose so would be a bit silly not to
Sitemap is the map showing all the links in your page in an abstract form. It tells the major search engine about the structure of your site, when was the last update etc. In fact, every time you update your site, create a sitemap.xml afresh and submit the same to the google by logging into your google webmaster tool. It just reminds the google bot to visit your site since it has been updated.
Indeed, SERPs is not concern to sitemap. You shouldn't tell google how many links your site has when it has poor content
Your main aim is to move the crawler to each pages of your website. So that you can target your all the keywords page wise.Until unless you will do it your all the keywords will not be targeted.For this reason you make a site map.Site map is a page where all the url(links) of your web site are found.
Its very useful if you have sitewide navigation structure on your site, using sitemap you can tell google and other search engines which pages on your site are the most important.
Recently I came across a great Google SiteMap FAQ that can give you a better perspective on how they work. It's from the official Google Webmaster blog - check it out. Apparently I'm unable to post any links since I'm a newbie but you can simply search for that blog. It'll help a lot of people I think.
Sitemaps are regarded as important for a website as it helps search engine bots to crawl & index your website fast. There are many tools available in internet which will help you to generate your google XML sitemap. The only drawback is that they create a sitemap with less than 500 links. If your website is having less than 500 web pages, you can us the online sitemap generator. But if your website is more than 500 web pages, then simply download GSiteCrawler & generate the sitemap.
Since you asked... There are free places online to create a sitemap. There is also a software package that you install on your desktop that will do it very easily. It will even upload your sitemap to your site and ping google to let it know to follow it. Program can be used on an unlimited number of sites. www.mapsbuilder.com
my site is quite new , 3 weeks , but i have leader position in Yahoo to" sex shop big cocks giant dildos" and in Google, too.. so i think in less than 1 month i'll be above sandbox, hope so sitemap of course works good useful thing for all webmasters guys but i could't verify my site on google tools for webmasters, it says always server timeout?