Site Maps

advice for a newbie re SMs

[Jazznjediluva]

I just started doing search engine work, no experience in this at all .... was wondering about the importance of site maps to placement? any advice at all?
i've seen our competitors stuff theirs with keywords and i just want to know if it makes a difference. thanks

[Imaster]

I generally use sitemaps for giving the surfers a better navigation where all the main/sub sections of my site appear on a single page or in case of a very large site, on several pages. This not only helps the surfers to locate information quicker but also helps in getting most of the pages of your site crawled. Of course, several other factors play a role, such a number/quality of links pointing to your site, etc for the search engine to go deeper.

Check out the following threads on site maps discussion:

Does Google Like Sitemaps? [webmasterworld.com]
Site map [webmasterworld.com]
Google search for "site map" keyword on WebmasterWorld [google.com]

Check out Google's sitemap for an idea: [google.com...]

Regarding your questions:

i've seen our competitors stuff theirs with keywords and i just want to know if it makes a difference

It could make a difference, but make certain it doesn't look spammy or the search engines could eventually penalize your site.

[wkitty42]

could you please define "spammy" WRT sitemaps?

if one uses a tool like Xenu to create a sitemap, could that appear spammy if the links contain the page title which carries the site name on every page?