XML Sitemaps are important for SEO because they make it easier for Google to find your site’s pages—this is important because Google ranks web PAGES not just websites. There is no downside of having an XML Sitemap and having one can improve your SEO, so we highly recommend them.
Post edited by TechnoBear to format and attribute quoted content
Want to add one more thing. you can also submit an image sitemap. It is also helpful to easily crawl your most of the images of website. Just make sure you have proper alt. & title attributes for your images.
Site map file names are case sensitive and I read somewhere that Google recommends Sitemap.xml as a default.
It is also recommended and I think is far more essential to have a robots.txt file specifying the name or names of your other site maps that do not have the default name.
You are right monkman site map is necessary to get better result in SEO But some time face many problem regarding site indexing in google webmaster . There no error in web site and sitemap but not crawling all the pages.
Well you are right for some website sitemap is not important like discussion forum, blogs, news & website which gives real time update, because Google crawl them frequently.
But according to Google sitemap (https://goo.gl/dZv0g) is important for those website which fall under any one below criteria.
Your website has large amount of pages
Pages are not linked to each other.
Your site is new and has few external links to it.
Your site uses rich media content, is shown in Google News, or uses other sitemaps-compatible annotations.
From my observations, html sitemap is useful when you have a blog because the oldest posts aren’t on first page.
I use the sitemap as a list of articles sorted by date. I call it “list of articles”. This boosts traffic to the oldest articles in google webmaster tools. In fact, after creating this page, i saw a boost in the number of visits coming from google seach.
On the other hand, it looks useless for static websites.
If not all pages are being crawled, that is when you need a sitemap.
Another option is “Fetch as Google” in WMT. It is good for getting new/updated content indexed fast.
Sometimes there is a reason why not all pages are indexed, for example if they have similar content.
You can also submit sitemaps to Google/Bing WMT to explicitly state which file it is.
Sitemap is very important part for any site. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site- i.e on one single page, you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them etc. It makes site navigation easier and promotes better visibility by search engines.
Good question @psd1231
Well, sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.
So you must create a good looking sitemap on your own blog and also have to submit sitemap in major search engine likes.
[quote=“GloriaWhisetter, post:19, topic:202462, full:true”]
Sitemaps are not used for visitors instead they are solely used for search engines to let them crawl your website.
[/quote]Sorry, but that is inaccurate, as you would have realised had you read the thread before posting.
It is difficult to say whether sitemap contribute in your search engine ranking or not.
But Sitemap is helpful when your website has wide range of URLs or you have changed the URLs on high amount in that situation you can submit your updated sitemap in Google webmaster to inform Google to recrawl the updated URLs.
It`s not true, even if your website do not have sitemap still Google will crawl the pages (Until you have not blocked any pages from Robots.txt).
Sitemap is important for E-commerce & other website those having large amount of pages. Sitemap only inform the Google about the new & existing pages in the website apart from that Sitemap.