XML sitemaps - Do we need to add it to our website??

Hi all, did some research on XML sitemaps. See below.

 

Google introduced Google Sitemaps so web developers can publish lists of links from across their sites. The basic premise is that some sites have a large number of dynamic pages that are only available through the use of forms and user entries. The Sitemap files contains URLs to these pages so that web crawlers can find them. Bing, Google, Yahoo and Ask now jointly support the Sitemaps protocol.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_map#XML_Sitemaps

 

>> A site map is basically lists of links across their sites. XML sitemaps differs from a basic (manual) sitemap in that it contains metadata on each URL .. see below…

 

In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

-http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

 

It is strongly recommended that you place your Sitemap at the root directory of your web server. For example, if your web server is at example.com, then your Sitemap index file would be at http://example.com/sitemap.xml. In certain cases, you may need to produce different Sitemaps for different paths (e.g., if security permissions in your organization compartmentalize write access to different directories).

-http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html

 

If we do not want to add sitemap to our sites, we still have to add a file to prove ownership of the site.

http://jazzymarketing.com/lc/0811/how-upload-xml-sitemap-google-yahoo-and-msn

 

XML Sitemaps have replaced the older method of "submitting to search engines" by filling out a form on the search engine's submission page. Now web developers submit a Sitemap directly, or wait for search engines to find it.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_map#XML_Sitemaps

>>or we could do away with XML altogether and just submit site manually to search engines. 

With Thanks, Andrea Ng

Digital Marketing Consultant

+8 GMT, Singapore