Site Maps - What are they and how to use them?

Sitemaps are an XML files you can (better to say - should!) submit to Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo SiteExplorer and Bing Site Explorer. It basically allow them to:

1. Find pages that were not found on the regular crawl
2. Understand the importance of every page (in a way)
3. Understand what is the right hierarchy between pages (What's consider to be a category/sub category etc.
4. Save bandwidth/resources when crawling our sites. (ie: the crawler decide better how often to visit the site/page )
A Sitemap looks like:

{?xml version="1}0" encoding="UTF-8"?}
{urlset xmlns="http://www}sitemaps}org/schemas/sitemap/0}9"}
{url}
{loc}http://www}example}com/{/loc}
{lastmod}2005-01-01{/lastmod}
{changefreq}monthly{/changefreq}
{priority}0}8{/priority}
{/url}
{/urlset}
(By the way, I changed the "<" and ">" to "{" and "}" because of squidoo code-cleaning)

loc = location of the page
lastmod = the last date the page was modified.
changefreq = frequency of changes accrue in this page
priority = from scale of 0-1.0 . 0.6 means this page is twice important than 0.3

-To get more information about XML sitemaps, you can visit:
Sitemaps.Org
Google Webmaster Tools

Important note: Sitemaps DO help in crawling, indexing and than Ranking.

Trust Factor - If you include only URLs which worth visiting for users (ie: for search engine also) - you get a good trust rank. Good trust rank means that SEs will pay more attention to the information which submitted.

Priorities - Worth setting 0.5 priority to all the pages.
Setting pages with higher frequency can sometimes provide a nice benefit worth the efforts. A good practice can be to set 5%-10% of the pages to higher frequency than other pages.
Sitemaps should be integrated through all respectable CMSs. In case you don't have the feature built in your CMS, a good solution you can be : http://gsitecrawler.com
Differences between site maps:

Mobile Site Maps

Including Urls for mobile platform can be a goldmine for mobile-users! Search engine will give you a major rank boost (of course with other factors involved%u2026) comparing to non-mobile competitors.

Please note: Websites with 2 versions for Desktops and Mobile - Should have 2 sitemaps and not only one.

- You can read more about it - Mobile Search Facrots and mobile URLs to a Sitemap

Images Site Maps

Less important, but you can get a decent amount of traffic through Google Image Search.

-Read more about it at SEOMOZ : Image SEO Basics

Geo Site Maps

Geo Sitemaps look like a normal sitemap file. Also, they are both the same version of xml format. The main difference between them is that the Geo Site Maps show the latitude and longitude associated with a specific page combined with information about the placemarker

Useful if you have different locations which you would like show up to. Great for searches like: "Plumber in Denver" and "Plumber in Washington DC".

HTML Site Maps

First, HTML sitemaps are for visitors. They can be useful for visitors to understand the hierarchy of a site, which is not always easy to understand.

But also for search engines. Not all the URLs we submit in XML site maps are getting inside the index. Visible links over the site help those deep pages to get crawled and finally to gain positions, traffic and gold %u2026

Do you use a sitemap ?
Can you show example of how this method did help you index your website through search engines?

Dish Network