Why Sitemaps are so important

Significance of Sitemaps

Today, there are numerous Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques that help you to optimise your website, but one technique whose importance is undervalued at times is aSitemap. A Sitemap is really a page on your website that indicates the complete structure of your site including various parts, links among them, and so forth. In short, it gives an in depth listing of your website layout. Sitemaps are extremely useful as they make site navigation easy for visitors plus help search engines index the site.

Sitemaps commonly fall into two categories. One is a HTML version which is for human website visitors and helps them navigate through the whole site and find the information they are searching for. The other Sitemap is an XML version that is intended for the search engine to know about all the pages on the website including all the URLs that may go unnoticed by the search engine spidering your website.

Sitemap advantages - There are several benefits of using sitemaps and these are listed below:

Quick Navigation - A sitemap helps a visitor know where to locate particular information he is seeking on the site. It acts as a guide to enable easy navigation through the site without wasting time to find information.

Search Engine Indexing - Sitemaps help search engines learn about any updates that you just make on your website. It is not guaranteed that the search engine bot will instantly index the updated webpages.  However, the modifications will certainly be indexed considerably faster when compared with when there isn’t any sitemap.Broken Links - If you have a site that contains a lot of content pages which are not properly linked to each other or have broken links then using sitemaps will help search engine bots to index your pages better.

Dynamic Content on Site - Sitemaps are also very helpful if you have a site where your content is updated or changed frequently. The search engines can be immediately informed of this change through your sitemap. However, this will not assure you that your changed pages will be indexed right away.

New Site - If you have a new site with very few links in it, sitemaps can be very helpful. This is because the search engine spider crawls through documents by following links from one page to another and if your site does not contain proper links, it would be difficult for the bots to index them.

Sitemap Process - To create a Sitemap for your website there are a few simple steps that you need to follow. First, a Sitemap has to be generated after which it needs to be uploaded to the site and then finally Google needs to be notified about it.

Sitemap Generation - A sitemap can be generated in two ways. One is by using an online tool that can help you generate the sitemap and the other is by downloading and installing a sitemap generator.  The first option is much easier compared to the second one as there are several online sitemap generation tools available free of cost that make your work simpler. The second option of downloading and installing a sitemap generator is a little difficult but enables you to gain a better control of the output.

Uploading and Submitting Your Sitemap - Once your sitemap is created, it has to be uploaded to your website and Google needs to be notified about it. In order to notify Google you have to add your site to your Google Sitemap account. However, if you don’t already have a Google Sitemap account, this is the time for you to create one. Also, it is important to know that adding a sitemap to your account requires a verification indicating you are the legal owner of the website.

Additionally it is important to know that Google does not guarantee that all the URLs in your sitemap are going to be spidered and indexed. For instance, if there are any image URLs in your sitemap, these will not be crawled and indexed. However, your sitemap can help the search engine to know more about your site layout which will help it to crawl your site better and faster when compared to not having a sitemap. Webmasters usually benefit from submitting sitemaps and will not be punished for it. 

Learn more about a specialised digital marketing strategy for your firm at http://www.wsionlinebiz.co.uk or give us a call at 01580 819529.