Does Your Site Need a XML Sitemap?

Have you read those standard beginner SEO books that still suggest having an XML sitemap and alt tags could get a site to the top of the search engines? There are plenty of those books around. I am a firm believer that every little thing that you do counts. But to pretend having a XML sitemap could get your site to the top of the search engines by itself is ludicrous. In fact, not all sites may even need a XML sitemap. The answer to this question asked by the user PowerCurtain on Gogole Webmaster Central clarifies this:

I my Google Webmaster tools, I have created a sitemap.xml file, listing 21 URLs for my website. However, Google crawler is only indexing 16 out of 21 URL’s submitted. Could someone please help me solve this problem. Thank you.

From the description, this does seem like a small site. Google’s JohnMu had this to say about this question:

With a site of that size, you don’t really need a Sitemap file, we’ll generally be able to crawl and index everything regardless. Also, with such a small Sitemap file, you can just check the individual URLs to see if they’re indexed like that.

There are many situations in which a sitemap can be a difference maker. But for a small site, it probably won’t be. If you own a small site, you would be better off spending your time creating more content.

[Image credit: Wikipedia]