Such thing as creating a 'good' XML sitemap?

[LiamMcArthur]

I've been using xml-sitemaps.com to automatically generate sitemaps for various websites our business have - I've been doing a little research and have only today realised that you can add <lastmod>, <changefreq> and <priority> tags into the xml sitemap (which apparantly benefit Google?) - xml-sitemaps.com do not do this for you, so if I was to put some time aside and manually create my sitemaps would this be beneficial from an SEO ranking point of view?, the way I see it is that if there is no importance at all of this, then why would it exist at all.

Also, I've noticed you can declare individual images, videos etc using tags such as <image:image> and <video:video> (parent tags) - what could this be beneficial?

[Sitemapper]

You could try A1 Sitemap Generator

It calculates priorities based on internal linking (taking into calculation of redirects, canonical, nofollow etc.) It can also create image and video sitemaps (which help you get those things indexed)

Do note that change frequency is hard to set correctly by a sitemapper tool. (Although there are ways to extrapolate a fair guess.)

Last mod is possible if the data can be retrieved in some way (http headers, meta tag, URL etc.)

[LiamMcArthur]

Thanks for that, I'll try it out.

Liam McArthur

[jazbo]

Take a look at the first page of google for a SERP, any SERP. Then use a plugin like SEO for firefox to see how many of those sites have sitemaps.

Sitemap and ranking correlation: zero.