Have you ever wonder what a Sitemap is? or why should you have a sitemap in your Website? There are various SEO tips and tricks that help improve a website but one of those, probably one of the most important and sometimes underestimated are sitemaps. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site. Sitemaps are XML files that list the URLs accessible on a website. The purpose of a sitemap is to help website owners and webmasters alert search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo about their URLs or links on a website that are available for indexing. Webmasters or website owners can list records regarding each URL or link, such as when it was last updated and its importance in the content of the website.Some webmasters might dispute that site index is a more accordingly used term to inform about page functionality, website visitors are used to noticing almost every term and oftentimes relate both as the same. Alternatively, a site index is frequently used to show an A to Z index that offers access to certain site content, while a site map offers an essential top to down overview of the entire available pages of a site. A XML structure is a document format and a development standard utilized, among the many other things, as the traditional for WebCrawler’s to index and analyze sitemaps. There are many examples of XML sitemaps. The support to the sitemaps are provided to the search engine crawler bot by a Robots Text file (robots.txt). Site maps can benefit search engine optimization of a website by ensuring that all the pages are available. This is very significant if a site uses a dynamic access to pages such as Flash or JavaScript modules that do not include HTML links.
Some Benefits of Sitemaps
The benefits of sitemaps are countless, is not only about navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps is an alternative to inform search engines immediately regarding any kind of changes or enhancements on your site. You cannot expect search engines to know about these changes and index content right away, but sitemaps certainly helps in the process and changes are index way faster than if a sitemap doesn't exist.
- Helps Search Engines index new content quickly
- Improves website Navigation
- Improves website organization
- Helps Large and complex websites
- A simple planning tool for web design
- No dead pages or pages that search engines don't know about
- Boosts more web traffic
- Utilizes important keywords
- Provides text links to every page of your website
- Pages are prioritized just how you want
