How important is it for my WP blog to have a site map ??

[jimkirk1943]

Hi guys,
Just asking if its really important for my site to have a site map ??

Its just a small WP blog micro niche site with acouple of pages i wont be adding more as of yet but sometimes raking takes alot longer for some of my keywords than i`d like i was just wondering if adding a site map to the site would make any difference ??

Cheers Jim

[Louise Green]

A sitemap won't hurt you.. it's a really good idea to use an XML sitemap so everytime you make a new post it pings all the big name search engines.

Next add it to Google Webmaster tools and you're flying.

You could even go one step further (might be of more use to others), creating a 'site map' for human visitors is also a good idea.. so you end up with 2 types of sitemaps.. confusing I know, but worth the extra effort.

A 'site map' is just a page that links to every page on your site, and is linked from every page in your site, and is aimed for humans instead of search bots.

[jimkirk1943]

Ok Lousie,
How do i make a google XLM site map ?

[Louise Green]

Here's a free plugin WordPress › Google XML Sitemaps WordPress Plugins (one of many, there's tons around)

[AceHazel]

Sitemaps makes it easy for the spiders to scan your site, making each page on your site available for anyone to see. It gives your webpage more structure.

XML Sitemaps Plugin is the one also I'm using.

[markshields]

Ok from reading this thread im now going to go over to my blog and look at putting an XML sitemap on there as there is alot of quality content that will be found

[DanRuby]

all my sites use an xml sitemap. i used to hand code them manually but since moving to WP a plug-in does it all for me.

very useful to have on every site.

[ASM Marketing]

You can also use Create your Google Sitemap Online - XML Sitemaps Generator for quick generation. I use it for my small static adsense websites.

You can also do it manually like so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset
xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9
http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd">

<url>
<loc>http://www.sitename.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2009-10-26T17:26:13+00:00</lastmod>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.sitename.com/index.html</loc>
<lastmod>2009-10-26T17:26:13+00:00</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>

Obviously you additional URLs as and when you need them

Alex