SEO Resources - Frequently Asked Questions
Will Adding a Sitemap Improve my Search Engine Rankings?
The short answer is "yes." The structure of websites can become very complex over time, and there is the chance that spiders, which visit your pages through external inbound links or branching out from your home page in most cases, may not be able to find new pages that you are hoping will be ranked highly for certain target keywords. The best solution is to create both a standard sitemap page for the user and one that is designed specifically for Search Engines.
The original and basic application of adding a sitemap to your website is for users to more easily find their way around your site. If they are looking for a specific page or section of your site and it normally requires the user to click through several link levels to get there a site map is a great way for them to skip ahead. Similarly, they might have seen a page earlier on your site that they'd like to revisit but they are uncertain as to where exactly that page lives - a sitemap is a quick and easy way for the user to see and navigate the overall structure of your site.
An additional benefit of a sitemap is that it allows Search Engines access to all sections and pages of your site through one high-level page. This can do a lot for the rankings of those individual sections/pages as it will provide a more direct link that can be at a much higher link level than the pages normally experience.
The basic format of a sitemap should appear similar to a table of contents in a book. Sections with pages and subsections - which then can have subsections of their own.
Search Engine SITEMAPS
Sitemaps for Search Engines are generally of a specific format that isn't always user-friendly. Since Search Engines are concerned with content and not with presentation most Search Engines utilize sitemaps that are in XML format. Google, the most popular and targeted Search Engine in the world, uses XML format for sitemaps.
There are various tools that can be used to index your pages and generate an XML sitemap. At XML-sitemaps.com there are tools. There is also a popular tool called GSiteCrawler. These are mostly free utilities but usually function very well.
WHY YOU SHOULD CREATE TWO SITEMAPS
While the first sitemap you create, that for the user, will also assist your SEO since the Search Engines will be able to crawl to all pages of your site from that hub (should it be visible to them. However, the XML sitemap tailored for Search Engines provides more information, like the frequency at which a page is updated, the importance of certain pages relative to others, etc. It is generally a good idea to have both - there is absolutely no evidence that it can hurt your rankings and plenty of evidence that it helps quite a bit.
