Is my sitemap going to help me attract more visitors?

[WillBlackburn]

Hi,

As I await my sitemap to go live, can someone tell me the main benefits of it? A Google sitemap that is .xml one.

I have a images sitemap also as the site is an e-commerce store.

Should I be expecting to see an increase in visitors when I implement it initially?

Thanks

Will

[STPseo]

It may allow more of URLs to get crawled, resulting in more URLs in the search index, hopefully resulting in more visitors. Here is what Google says about sitemaps:

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.

read the whole post here.

[RyanKent]

Stephan's reply is spot on.

In short, if you do not have any island pages nor any pages buried deeply in your site, and you offer solid navigation then submitting a sitemap offers no benefit at all. If you have a poor design or other issues, a sitemap can allow pages to get indexed which otherwise might be missed.

[WillBlackburn]

Cheers. Exactly how I thought it would be.

[irvingw]

Just to add a bit, if your pages are being frequently updated you can add a published date and frequency of updates in the XML You can also prioritize the pages (like giving your category pages a higher priority). However, only use these optional parameters in the XML if they will be used correctly and this will definitely help the bots in crawling your site. If your pages hardly ever get updated, then it makes little sense to let Google know in the sitemap that your pages never change.