Hi to all I have many people telling me about site map they say it is important, but when I went and got a look on their site its seem that they dont have a sitemap but they are on top in the first page it self. It is important that the question I ask my self, any one can give me a suggestion ?
Thanks
Welcome to DaniWeb chomkler!
When people are talking about site maps they might be referring to two slightly different things. In the early days of the internet people tried to make it easier for users to find items on their website. To do that they created a webpage that linked to all their other pages and called it a site map. More recently search engines have stated accepting XML files. This type of site map is less about helping users and more about helping the search engines robots reach all of your content.
Sitemaps (either type) can be helpful in exposing your content. Personally I do not use site maps. That is because all of pages are interlinked and have inbound links from other websites. The search engines can follow those links to find all of my content. Users can easily follow the drill down links and other related links that I have placed on each page. So for me and for anyone else that has all of their pages properly interlinked a site map is sorta redundant.
A site map does not have any direct connection to ranking in the top position. The main purpose of the site map is to make your content more accessible. It does not make the content more valuable to search engines. To make your site more valuable and thus rank higher you should focus on relevant, keyword rich content and developing good quality links.
Don't take my word for it just look at the top ranking sites and see how many are missing sitemaps. Now look at their content and backlinks. Notice any similarities :)
A site map, sometimes written "sitemap," is an overview of the pages within a website. Site maps of smaller sites may include every page of the website, while site maps of larger sites often only include pages for major categories and subcategories of the website. While site maps can be organized in a variety of ways, most use an outline form, with pages arranged by topic. This gives visitors a good overall picture of how the site is organized and clearly defines all the resources the website has to offer.
Sitemap is mostly important if for some reason your internal navigation links are particularly search engine UN friendly.
This is the case if you site uses Flash for it's menu's for example -- or perhaps Javascript menu system. Another case is if you use a server based menu system - that uses alot of parameters on the URL String to navigate you from one page to another - something like yoursite?nav=1&pageId=13 -- Many such systems dont create good permanent links - as you add content to your sites - or the search engines simply ignore the URLs.
In those cases - the Sitemap will help GoogleBot and others find all the relevant content pages of your site - which they would likely not be able to "see" otherwise.
If you have completlely Search Engine friendly URLs - then a sitemap adds little incremental value.
kceleb9 makes a very good point about the relevance. It all depends on your urls and how easy to follow they are. Another point for sitemaps are for those sites who don't want search engines to follow links. A sitemap would help there.
I personally like to use sitemaps for search engines. It helps them know what pages need indexed when you launch a site, and it couldn't hurt to keep one updated while you are growing the site and after it is established. ;)
It all comes down to preference.
Hi to all I have many people telling me about site map they say it is important, but when I went and got a look on their site its seem that they dont have a sitemap but they are on top in the first page it self. It is important that the question I ask my self, any one can give me a suggestion ?
Thanks
every thing is important but up to a certain level. Yeh site map is also important factor but that does not lead a site to top in SERP. There are lots of other factor who plays a important role to put website top in SERP.
Site map help search engine to index all the pages from one place that it. site map content no more importance than this but still this little importance play a vital role so dont underestimate it and dont over estimate too.
Probably they did not link the sitemap from their site but they have it submitted to google and yahoo. try to login in at google webmaster tools and submit your sitemap so you would know if search engines are indexing your site pages.
;)
Thank you all for the answers
i think all answers increase my knowledge
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