SEO Tycoon

**jim.thornton** · 03-31-2006, 09:41 AM

I have been reading around the web and have seen some articles where it says to submit a site map to google. However, I have also read articles which say NEVER submit your site to google and instead build back links and it will index automatically.

So my question is, do site maps help at all? And if so, so I use Google's Submit site map?

**gringo** · 03-31-2006, 11:02 AM

Submitting your site to google and submitting a sitemap to google are two different things. Sitemaps help google find pages on your site that it otherwise might find difficult to crawl. Submitting your site is unnecessary - if you have backlinks, google will follow those links and crawl your pages

**chrishirst** · 03-31-2006, 01:33 PM

exactly what gringo said.

site maps in general are useful to visitors and search engines, if structured correctly they can bring all the pages in a site within one or two clicks of the "home" page.

**jim.thornton** · 03-31-2006, 07:41 PM

So I am sensing that having a Site Map is definitely a good idea. And submitting that Site Map to google is also a good idea.

You mentioned *if constructed correctly*. Could you direct me to either an example of how one should construct a site map or direct me to some articles where I may learn the same.

thanks.

**vangogh** · 03-31-2006, 09:55 PM

All you really need to do is create a sitemap with links to the other pages of your site. Make sure the links are all text links. No javascript. Then put a link on your home page (also a text link) to the sitemap. That's all you need to do. You don't need to submit it to Google.

Google sitemaps is something you can do if the navigation on your site prevents spiders from crawling the site. In that case then you can go use the sitemaps program at Google. You shouldn't need to though if you have a sitemap on your own site and better yet have navigation that's makes it easy for the search spiders to follow.

**jim.thornton** · 04-01-2006, 12:03 AM

Thank you.