Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

It's important, certainly not the most important thing in SEO. If you have a complex site you should provide it as a service to your site visitors. From a SEO standpoint it's another place for search bots to crawl your site.

Also take a look at the Google approved xml sitemap format: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/protocol.html

Ultimately the best road to SEO success is to have a great website that serves your clients (and potential clients) in every way possible; articles, white papers, demos, news, etc., etc.

Andy Durban

An HTML sitemap can be helpful but, arguably, an xml sitemap is a key element of technical SEO.

I say "arguably" because some SEO conspiracy theorists feel that there is some hidden agenda behind sitemaps where red flags are raised within the SEs.

I don't subscribe to that theory and from experience I have found that XML sitemaps are worthwhile implementing. An xml sitemap can resolve indexing issues enabling more of your pages to be discovered.

Some of the applications where you submit your sitemap can also help diagnose numerous other issues.

When you create your sitemap be sure to include a reference to the sitemap within your robots.txt file as in:

Sitemap: https://www.somedomain.com/sitemap.xml

(provided that your sitemap is named "sitemap.xml".
See https://sitemaps.org/ for more information.)

You can submit your web site in the following locations:

Google Webmaster Tools:
www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Yahoo Site Explorer:
https://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/siteexplorer/
(note signup link at the top, right of the page)

Live
https://webmaster.live.com/

Ask
https://about.ask.com/en/docs/about/webmasters.shtml#22
(see "Q: Does Ask.com support sitemaps?")

If you have a canonical URL issue you will want to resolve it prior to submitting your sitemap (see: https://www.trinitysem.com/2007/06/06/canonical-url-www-vs-no/ ).

If you are using a CMS you will also want to resolve duplicate content issues (multiple URLs with the same content) as well prior to submission.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Greg Hill
Trinity Search Engine Marketing

Since I have had an XML sitemap all of my pages have been indexed. How does this translate into Search Ranking? It is not clear, but it certainly doesn't seem to be hurting.

There is a great tool at https://www.xml-sitemaps.com . There is a free generator for smaller sites and a tool you can purchase for a small fee and create sitemaps for larger sites.

Hope this helps,
Mike

The question was:

"I have heard recently that having an ror sitemap for your website can be a real help in your SEO efforts.

The answer is yes.

If the question was:

"I have heard recently that having an ror sitemap for your website can be a real help in your search engine rankings.

The answer is yes. And no.

It won't contribute to achieving one rank over another. Throwing links at something doesn't always solve every problem. If the page is not indexed and the xml sitemap corrects that then the page stands a chance of ranking. No chance at all if not indexed.