The sitemap provides an alternative path that is useful to overcome any problems of reaching a given page by the web spider, so the site owner should use relevant keywords in the links to reinforce the rankings on those words.
Most visitors will use the standard navigation buttons on your site to find what they want. This is a very convenience feature as a visitor need not browse through many other pages in order to know what the website is all about, the reader can easily figure out the theme and specialty of the website. A sitemap gives an alternative path in case they don't find your navigation structure especially sites using dynamic pages.
- The sitemap priority is to reduce the importance placed on less important pages (like a contact page) and also influence the links google will display in your authority listing (sitelinks).
- A sitemap allows you to ping Google, Yahoo, and MSN when you've updated your site,it will get them back crawling your site faster than if you had waited for the bots to come on their own.
- Also a useful thing about Sitemaps is the list of URLs not found. It can be very useful for tracking down missing content that's still linked to.
What Google says about Sitemaps:
Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:
* Your site has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process - for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash.
* Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn't well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
* Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.
If your website is having indexation problems, or has a poor internal link structure, or falls in one of the three situations described by Google, then using a Sitemap would probably be great . Further more, if you need help with site map, come to Webmater Serve its a good place to learn.
Note that it's not all about having your sitemap submited to google and sitting down to relax, the most important thing is how frequently you add fresh, quality and unique content on your website. The simplest way to maximize your SEO strategy is to constantly work on adding keyword rich content to your website, and increase your quality backlinks. Search engines typically build their indexes by crawling links on websites.
