Sitemap showing less than 25% URLs indexed

[dailypress]

I just checked my Google Webmaster and noticed my sitemap shows less than 25% URLs indexed.
The site is almost 1 year old!

Is this normal? Or am I doing something wrong?

Sitemap stats
Total URLs: 4,741
Indexed URLs: 1,260

Thanks,
DP

[goodroi]

Sitemaps help the search engines find your urls.
Valuable content convinces the search engines to index those discovered urls.

If you do not have significant unique content on each page the search engines will think those pages are just duplicates and not index them. To increase the amount of pages that are indexed work on your internal content and external websites linking to you.

[dailypress]

thanks Goodroi for your response.... Will do.
I can now see which URL's (Direct links to images for example) may not have been indexed.

[maximillianos]

It is rare that G will index 100% of what is in your sitemap. We have improved our indexing to around 75% by focusing on internal linking. Essentially we are trying to get some of our deeper content more exposure within our site. Seems to be helping.