Sitemaps: How Important Are They?

[MocKCee]

Well, some say sitemaps are only beneficial if you have a very large website; makes it easier for Google to index your site without consuming a lot of bandwidth. They say that it is a waste of time and energy for small websites.

Others simply say that having a sitemap can't hurt. I tend to agree with the latter. Having a sitemap won't hurt you. I’m surprised at how little awareness there is among webmasters about the importance of a sitemap.

There are 2 reasons for having a sitemap: (1) To help your visitors find the right content; and (2) To help search engines index your site correctly.

While sitemaps do not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, they do provide hints for web crawlers (Google and Yahoo) to do a better job of crawling your site.

I use sitemaps on all of my websites (small, medium, and large). You can see the use of sitemapping at my Ipsarion Weblinks site. (Look for the sitemap link).

When I log into my Google Webmasters account, I can see that Google had indexed over 22,000 of my webpages.

Also, on one of my smaller websites (http://www.1clickdvd-copy.com) containing only 48 web pages, I use sitemaps. Again, when I log into my Google Webmasters account I see all 48 indexed.

My recommendation is to get into the practice of employing sitemaps on all your completed websites. It is very easy:

1. Get yourself a Google Webmasters account. It is free. Go to: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

2. Go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ and create a sitemap. Once your website has been crawled, you want to download three files: sitemap.xml, urllist.txt, and sitemap.html

3. Upload these three files to your server. (public_html or web directory)

4. Login into your Google Webmasters account and submit the URL to your sitemap.xml file.

5. Go to the Yahoo! Site Explorer page at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit and find the Submit Site Feed box and submit the URL to your urllist.txt file

6. The sitemap.html file is for you. Since this is an html file you can customize to fit the theme of your website or use it as it is. To use it, simply place a link to it on your index page or any of the pages on your website.

As your website grows, you want to re-create new sitemap files and upload them to your server to over overwrite the old ones. Then re-visit Google Webmaster and Yahoo Site Explorer and repeat steps 4 and 5.

Are sitemaps important? I think so. They certainly can't hurt you.