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Your site is a treasure. Create a treasure (site)map!

You are less than 1 in a billion. Feeling small yet?  The bright side is that visitors still reach your site everyday, and by adding an XML sitemap to your website files, Google and other search engines can index those unlinked pages just a bit easier.

Why use a sitemap?

  1. A treasure map to all your content. Your sitemap can include all the URLs from your site, even the hard to find ones that don’t have many pages linking to them.
  2. Let them find important stuff first. You can set the priority of a specific page.  You know what pages of your site are more important.  “Priority” number lets the search engines know how  important a given page is relevant to all the others on your site.
  3. Give the search engines a hand. You can help the search engines even more with the lastmod and changefreq tags.  The tag lastmod lets them know when a page last changed, and changefreq tells how often the page is likely to change.

Why not use a sitemap?

Well, if you are monitoring Google Webmaster tools (or using a service like us that monitor’s it for you), and your site is new, then by not submitting a sitemap, you can see how Google indexes your site which will give you a hint as to how well your site architecture is.   Your webmaster can learn some information from this to improve you site.   However, once they have this insight, a sitemap should be used.

By using a sitemap it will lead to an increase in the number of pages in the index.

Conclusion:   A good sitemap.xml files = more visitors!