The Significance of a Sitemap

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Many website owners ignore building a Sitemap of their websites. However, the sitemap of your website is an integral part of its development, which makes it very important not only for the visitors but also for most search engines. Here is why you should not underestimate a well-built sitemap.

What is a Sitemap?

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In general terms, a Sitemap is a page or pages containing a list with all articles uploaded on your website with links to these articles. Initially, Athe concept of building a Sitemap was only for the website visitors’ convenience in order to allow them to find everything they need on the website more easily. In addition, the website’s sitemap also allows you not to remove every page of your website directly to the homepage.

However, in the last few years the word “Sitemap” gainer greater importance for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), because sitemaps can be actually used to guide search engines to all major content pages. This is especially true for larger websites, where you need a few clicks in order to get to certain pages through numerous points and sub-points. In addition, if a certain website has thousands of pages, its webmaster should really consider dividing its sitemap into sections to provide visitors with the opportunity of an easier navigation. This also means that search engines’ robots will be made a lot easier in order to find all pages. When there is a sitemap, search engines actually feel a lot more “comfortable”, because they navigate through your website easily and more quickly, which also means they won’t miss to index any page.

What makes the Sitemap so important for your website?

1. As we have already said, the Sitemap is actually a list that contains some information about the pages uploaded to your website, which is usually organized in a hierarchical structure. Usually, the Sitemap is a XML or a HTML document that is used not only by the users of your website, but also by search engines. So, putting a Sitemap guarantees that all of your content pages will be displayed for the robots of search engines. Otherwise, the robots will have to work much harder in order to find all content pages, and this often leads to some problems.

2. When you provide search engines’ robots with all necessary information in the form of a single page that includes a map of all website’s pages, this will definitely make their work easier and will guarantee you that the robots won’t miss some pages. Putting a Sitemap is extremely efficient no matter if it comes to a new website, or not. Search engines always use it, without taking into account the overall structure and easiness of your website. Of course, you better consider the arrangement of the categories and pages on your website and then create a Sitemap.

3. Sitemap has an important part in the formation of a Google PageRank, which is one of the main parts of Google’s algorithm. If you have a sitemap that is connected with every one of the pages of your website, then you have something that is much more than a list, which is used in order to make visitors of your site easier. The real advantage of making a sitemap comes when you make it right and put the content into certain categories and connect the sitemap with these categories. The other subcategories must be connected via internal links among themselves. All this makes search engines give your website a better ranking.

So, creating a proper sitemap gives you a double advantage, because you will provide the visitors of your website with convenience on one hand, and you will find a better and more successful approach towards the robots of most search engines on the other hand.

On the Internet there are many online tools that are completely free, which you can use in order to create the Sitemap of your website. Of course, these tools may be used only in case your website is static, i.e. you don’t add any new information or articles on it. We also recommend you to create your website Sitemap in a XML format because these are the only files that can be sent directly to Google via Webmaster Tools.

How to make an efficient Sitemap for your website?

First, and most important, there must be a link to your Sitemap only from your homepage, because:

• Search engines will find this link directly from your homepage and will follow it from there on. And this means exactly to hit bull’s eye, because the search engine’s robot will go directly in the content of your website. In these cases it is quite enough to give the robots only your homepage and they will do the rest of the work by themselves.

• According to the rules for determining PageRank, the links between the Sitemap and the homepage increases the ranking not only yo the homepage, but also to all other pages that it leads to through a hyperlink.

This is a Guest Post by Morgan Johnes , a assistant manager in CleanToPerfection. If you would like to write for Method2Earn, check our submission guidelines.