What is the best way to prepare a sitemap?

I heard that sitemap has turned to be the key factor in Google

[AjiNIMC]

Hi all,

Some of the experts told me that Sitemap is the key factor these days and there is a proper way for it.
I consultant 10 experts

20% said that you should keep only the main pages under sitemap(against the golden rule).
70% list all pages(golden rule), 100 links per page.
10% said that list almost all but donot not list the pages such as link page e.t.c

Which is the way to go? What is the new format for the sitemap.

Thanks
Aji

[madmatt69]

Dreamweaver used to have an extension that would generate a list of links to all the page in your site, but it only works with Dreamweaver 4 :(

I did find a couple of utilites, some of them work well...But they still leave a lot to be desired.

Opportunity knocks for an aspiring programmer, I guess. :) I'd pay a few bucks to generate good quality site maps that do what we need them to do.

[neuron]

for spider maps, I always include a bot [noindex,follow] command so that the search engines will not index and list my spider map pages in search results, but will follow all the links and index them. I do not use a site map for visitors because the navigational system easily allows users to get around the site. If the site were more complex, I would build a user site map.

This one site is 880 pages. The basic site is about 40 pages. 744 pages are SEO'd pages, each dedicated to a single key word or phrase. The optimized pages are the ones I want the search engines to find and index and they are named big-red-widgets.html, little-red-widgets.html, medium-blue-widgets.html ect., I then spider map the site alphabetically where I list all the pages that start "A" on map-a.html and all the pages that start with "B" on map-b.html, etc. Then I also divide the site into categories by noun, verb and/or adjective, so that I will have categories for "Big Widgets", "Medium Widgets" and "Small Widgets" as well as for "Red Widgets", "Green Widgets", and "Blue Widgets". In this way, I spider map the pages so that each page is listed two or three times. The map might look like:

Spider Map
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q etc

Red Widgets Big Widgets Small Widgets
Green Widgets Blue Widgets Medium Widgets
X-Large Widgets Purple Widgets Pink Widgets
Tiny Widgets Favorite Widgets Bad Widgets
Tall Widgets Yellow Widgets Edible Widgets

So, my page "large-purple-edible-widgets.html" would be on spider map pages map-L.html, map-large.html, map-purple.html, and map-edible.html.

Oh, and you would be surprised how fast these pages get indexed and ranked as a result. My prediction of a 4200% increase in traffic to this one site is off by several weeks (in the right direction). If it goes up in the SERPs any faster, I'll look like I don't know what I'm talking about. Ever prayed your site won't grow so fast? It's a sick feeling.

[Global Wayne]

Oooops neuron - is this onsite optimisation or straight out spam cluster?

I often loose track of what the key is here - real content - or SEO for the sake of it?

For me I prefer to see optimised pages that fit into my actual content as I build them - rather than stacks of pages written for the sole purpose of SEO. In this way we never get trashed when G changes the algo...

Just a thought ;)

/Wayne