Sitemap-Is it necesarry for a small website?

[katwright]

Hi everyone,
I recently read it that a sitemap can help your search engine ranking. I visited some bigger websites and true they all had it. The question is a small website with let's say 5 pages need it? Doesn't it look weird ? I believe consumers are very educated nowadays and they must know that some sitemaps are not for their use, just for search engines.
What do you think?

[Corey Bryant]

So I guess you are referring to this type of sitemap and not XML sitemaps?

If it's just a five page website, chances are you will have all five links posted on your pages. But are you asking for a SE point of view or a consumer point of view?

[katwright]

I personally like the look of the XML sitemap. I don't think that consumers look at sitemaps if it is a small webpage with a well understood design. I needed some information for SEO that I'm trying to do for my company.
http://www.thewrightcorner.com

[roban]

A Google site map will help and it certainly won't hurt. So this begs the question: "why wouldn't you do it?"

[The Old Sarge]

One of our sites did just "ok" without a sitemap for a couple of years. Once we added one, the SERPs improved immeasurably. Even if you don't use the Google SiteMap thing and create your own, and submit it, it can only help.

edited to add: Even if customers rarely use it, the SEs will.

[JPnyc]

At the SEO seminars I've attended, site maps was on the list of things to do to aid your ranking. So I would think it would certainly help

[Matty1976]

100% yes! Add it - it'll cost nothing, help your users (only a little bit) but it'll also help with your SEO. Also pop along to your Google account and upload a site map to them - again, it won't happen over night, but it'll help them understand what your site is about quicker than if they didn't have it.

Hope this helps.

Matt

www.ecclesiastical.com

[katwright]

Thanks everyone. I finally got around to add a sitemap. Now I just have to wait and see.

[jacksan]

Sitemap is one of the best way to your website indexed by google search engine. It can provides webmaster a clear picture on how the web site is organized. Also, when your website get complicated, the site map button can provides a shortcut to the visitor to navigate between different pages in your site.

[Bill Engvall]

Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don't have a sitemap.

Also, when you have a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, you rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site. Sitemaps can even help with messy internal links - for instance if you by accident have broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other way (though there is no doubt that it is much better to fix your errors than rely on a sitemap).

[cathren]

sitemap is more important fro the sites that has a few pages than that has much links because , whereas the site has more pages it will be more important

[scottcaan]

Site map are really very helpful for site which has many pages. But as you sites like 5 pages are not that useful. But there are two types of sitemaps html and xml where html site map are for user purpose and the xml site map are for search engines and even 5 pages site also needs xml site map so it is better to go for a xml site map for your 5pages site too. Creating a site map is not a big deal so I think it would be better to create both the sitemaps and upload to your site.

[3oltan]

Sitemaps are very important for your website because they provide additional information about your website that is normally not provided by the search engine spiders crawling the web. For example, you can inform the search engines about the frequency with which you feed new data into your website or the regularity with which you modify and update your website's contents.
Apart from this, sitemaps are also helpful in highlighting each page of your website (and facilitating indexing of all pages of your website), although several of the pages of your website may not be well-linked to each other.

[newbie2010]

Yes, it is batter for small business, so that any business man can search your site easily.

[libralibra]

Thanks, I didn't not think that it was that important.