Hi guys, forgive my rookie question I am completely new to the SEO world. I feel I know the basics and am slowly learning to delve into the advanced stuff.

My question is whether or not sitemaps are important to keyword ranking of a site and why? If not what is it good for? I am looking for a way to justify spending time to write a script that will crawl through our sites and generate a sitemap.

are more 'fresh' and updated quicker in Google's index when you do sitemaps. I wouldn't say that we rank better because of them, and I don't think you should, but it seems to get changes into Google's index quicker.

Sitemaps are good for crawlability of your website - SEs can index some of your pages which are in a sitemap (since you give'em direct URLs), even if their spiders haven't yet reached these pages

sitemaps are also great for learning about any errors the spiders may be incountering on your site. Moreover, there are a ton of free google site map generators out there. There is even a dreamweaver extention that will build your site map for you.

Somebody already pointed out that there are plenty of free sitemap generators out there. Here's one that I use a lot:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com (http://)

It's free, easy to use, and generates your sitemap in several formats. I give it a big thumbs-up.

-ASG

Hey guys very sorry for the slow response. I appreciate all the advice given and have decided that my sites will benefit from a sitemap, but have also decided to not use the generators found online. i feel they will be to bandwidth hungry on a server that hosts hundreds of sites, plus I will want to have control over which pages are listed in the map. I am going to continue researching who to create a custom generator of my own.