Thread: Site maps

How does site maps helps to improve the traffic? Do they also have any effect on rankings?

No, Sitemap may not have direct relationship with traffic or rankings. However they are quite helpful for the crawlers know about your pages. It helps faster crawling.

Use the sitemap section in the robots.txt to let the crawlers know where your site's sitemap is located.

I use google xml sitemap with my wordpress blog... It just help the google bots to navigate your blog better....

There are two types of Google sitemaps, are being used in the websites so one for the Search engines to crawl easily and early and second for the users to make website more user friendly that they could the pages for that they were searching.

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover.

To provide google and other search engines a site map for crawling is one of the mos important steps to get a good ranking, otherwise sites without site map are going to be dramatically ignored.
Once you have a site map of your website or/and blog, the search engines crawlers are going to visit your site frecuently and extract data from your source code in order to appear on the rankings.

So, don´t forget to include a site map

HTML sitemaps help to get you traffic but XML will help you index all the web pages of your site. however HTML Sitemaps helps rankings but that percentage is very Low.

Sitemap has no directly relation with search engine ranking.

yup, sitemaps do not help with ranking, but they are good ways for the spiders to find the pages of your site and get them indexed.

1 – Accessibility. The SiteMap helps search engines access every page of your website. If search engines have trouble navigating through your site from your main links, the SiteMap provides a secondary route to those pages. The more content search engines can access on your site, the more pages you have for searches to find and hence, more traffic.
2 – Keyword Association. On the SiteMap page you can write keyword-rich descriptions for each link. This helps search engines associate specific keywords with specific pages of your website. The more this association happens, the higher your pages rank for those keywords.

if you help search engines access more pages and associate keywords with those pages, you will increase your rankings and traffic.