Should I add a Site Map to my website?

[hetaltbs]

Will it help me to get better rankings in Google ??

[irish luck]

Sitemap is vital piece of the marketing puzzle for your website, always have a sitemap for your site, It allows Search engines to crawl and index your site effectively. Anytime a new page or piece is added to the site add it to the sitemap it is SEO basics

[trinsleynewton]

yes you should because it will make easy for the user to navigate your site.

[mobileappslink]

Will it help me to get better rankings in Google ??

I agree with the other two replies - the benefit of having one out weights the time it takes to create one.

[EmilyJohnson]

More ever crawler also used this sitemap page to reach and index each and every page of your website.

[kerin1539]

A sitemap is more generally known as a file of the XML type which has the function of listing the URLs for any site.The sitemap allows the webmaster to give information about the URLs to the search engines.

[mrhistorian]

There are two different sitemaps. One is to let your visitors navigate easier on your website, which is called html sitemap, and the other is to give an idea to search engines' spider which is called xml sitemap. If your purpose to help search engines crawl your website more effectively you should have an xml sitemap.

[joeyoungblood]

YES you should have a sitemap! But no, it likely doesn't affect your rankings a whole lot (an HTML sitemap might pass some link juice).

Create both an XML and an HTML sitemap.

HTML SITEMAP
1. To help you create one use the Xenu Link Sleuth:
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Download

2. Link to the Sitemap in your footer.

3. Add a meta robots tag for 'noindex, follow'
- sitemap pages are thin and shouldnt be indexed. however, you want the spider to find and crawl the page to find new links when they are added.

4. this page is for users so make it easy to use, a list of links kills me. i prefer the 'tree' layout design for HTML sitemaps, but since its not indexed go crazy and do something epic.

5. If your site updates dynamically (UGC, blog, etc..) then use the sitemap page to link to 'areas' of the website and NOT specific posts, items, etc..

6. If it is a static or manually updated site then link off to the most important content that you want users to find easily

7. Make sure the premo pages are listed first, that is the ones that are most important to you. a spider may not crawl all the way down.

XML SITEMAP
1. To help you create one by hand use the Xenu Link Sleuth:
http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Download

2. To make a manual XML sitemap review the Sitemaps.org Protocol:
http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php

3. To have one autogenerated for you use a tool like this one:
http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

SUBMITTING SITEMAPS
1. Make a Google Webmaster Tools Account here: https://www.google.com/webmasters/

2. Claim your domain

3. Go here and submit your XML sitemap: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/sitemap-list?hl=en&siteUrl=http://www.yourdomain.com/

4. Go here and enter the HTML sitemap page in the box, select "web" and click "Fetch": https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch?hl=en&siteUrl=http://www.yourdomain.com/

5. After the page is fetched click on "Submit URL and linked pages to index"

and BOOM! you've created two sitemaps, submitted both and nudged the Googlebot and Bingbot to come crawl your pages and index them.

[vanilla23]

It one of the ranking factor. It help to index all pages of website.

[joy.m]

Yes, create a HTML & XML sitemap for your website & then add your xml sitemap to the webmaster tool. It will help you to get crawl your website by the search engine

[prcys]

Will it help me to get better rankings in Google ??

I have heard that people submit the sitemap in google to make their site more noticeable by google and for fast indexing also. But what i believe is that if you have a sitemap then it will be easy for your customer to move to the demanded page directly and they not get confusion. And if your site is so huge and contains so many pages then you have to submit the sitemap.

[reganstar]

The sitemap also has to be updated well if the site is constantly changing content (as for news websites). This update can be performed automatically by the Scheduled Tasks option in the OS.

[movielinks]

Will it help me to get better rankings in Google ??

Sitemap doesn't help in Search result ranking, It will help your site to get index on search engine. Usually, You don't need to submit sitemap (if your page depth is not very high), Nowadays search engines are smart enough to crawl all the relevant pages

[manuelcrc]

Sitemaps are very important in helping search engines crawl your blog faster. I checked one of my recent posts on Bing and Yahoo and discovered it hasn't been indexed...it was my sitemap that came up in the search.

[crishlay]

Sitemap always be useful for visitors and google even for mapping your site's URL

[DejanL]

yes u sude add sitemap to your website

[selina12]

Yes adding site map to your site is very important as it gives the clear idea about the structure of your site and links in your site

[Rauny]

Yes you should add site map to you website. A sitemap for your site allows Search engines to crawl and index your site effectively. Means it helps to recognize all the pages that are available on your site.

[nanbane]

It is a interesting sharing.......

[vinodkunwar]

Yes, is right that sitemap is need to navigation pages and link to improve site ranking but it's not so important as we know........and a site map, sometimes written "sitemap," is an overview of the pages within a website.

Thanks,