Site maps - how important?

[Steve]

I am guessing this is why lawn care business owners should consider using something like wordpress to base their website design on?

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thanks for the pitch Steve...I am not going to say that wordpress is the saving grace of online presence. I will however say that wordpress is probably the best SEO platform out there...but you still need to know what you are doing for SEO...its not a 'poof' type of thing. It is the best site to learn on how to update your content. Setup and customization can be a pain, but it is worth it.

[Steve]

Richard,

Can you tell us why some site have links for their sitemap while others do not? Is it important to have a sitemap link? Will search bots find them and make note of them or do you have to do this manually and let the search engines know of their existence?

[Steve]

Also,

I was looking at Richard's and another forum member's site map and they apeear different.

Richard's looks like a list of links while the other looks like it is filled with more code.

Why do these differ and what difference does this make?

that is only because my sitemap has a stylesheet....if you were to view the source code on my sitemap you'll see that they are the same.

[Steve]

Thanks!

I noticed there are a bunch of settings, like how often the search engines should visit a certain page. How important are these settings?

What if you have them come too often and you don't have any changes? Or what if you have them come not often enough and you do make changes?

[Quality-Hosting]

I think something that should be added to this discussion about SEO, sitemaps etc... is that having a website for your "geographic specific" lawn care business, needs to be just that, targeted for your location.

You have hundreds of millions of searches each day on Google, Yahoo and others and you are not trying to compete on a national or worldwide basis, you are only competing on the search engines with the companies that a local to you.

Think about it? When a person gets on the internet to search for a company to mow their lawn, they are not going to search for the words lawn care and scroll through 10 million sites to find one in their city. They are going to be "geographic specific", they are going to search on terms such as "lawn mowing houston tx" which will provide a few hundred. This is where you want target where your site ranks.

All I am saying is to not get to caught up about SEO as you are not trying to be the first link on Google's page and certainly don't pay some SEO company that says they can get you a TOP 10 listing.

[Steve]

All I am saying is to not get to caught up about SEO as you are not trying to be the first link on Google's page and certainly don't pay some SEO company that says they can get you a TOP 10 listing.

What do you suggest the average lawn care business owner who has a website do, to make their site more "geographic specific" friendly?