Often you will see that there is a little link on the front page of a website that is labeled Sitemap. So, what is a Sitemap? Basically, it is a graphical representation of the structural and hierarchical linkage of a web site. A sitemap is often considered as unnecessary and a waste of time in the process of building a website. This is, however, far from the truth. In the following writing, we will see why a sitemap is a must for any decently competent website.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes
By creating a sitemap, a single page which contains links to every single page on your site is created. This is extremely beneficial for the indexing of pages on the site. When a search engine robot found this page, it will follow the links on the sitemap and therefore every single page of your site will get crawled and indexed. A good place for the sitemap link is on the top right side of the page.
Also, more often than not, the homepage of the site has the highest page rank. By placing a sitemap link there, all the pages on website will be indexed much faster.
Easy Navigation for site visitors
The sitemap is a place where the visitor can browse all the links on the site. This is the one-stop place to navigate the website as it is linked to all pages on the site.
Conveys and describes the topic of the site
By reading the titles of the links on the sitemap, a reader can easily figure out the theme and specialty of the website. This is a very convenience feature as a visitor need not browse through many other pages in order to know what the website is all about.
The above-mentioned points are reasons why sitemaps are important for search engine optimization and enhancement of visitor experience. In addition to those reasons, a sitemap is also relevant from the webmaster's perspective too. This is because, a sitemap enables the webmaster to evaluate the entire website as a whole. From the overall evaluation, he/she can then improve the site by:
- Adding new contents to fill up gaps within certain regions of the site
- Modifying existing contents for a better design flow
- Removing duplicated pages and contents as they are bad for search engine optimization
From the essay thus far, we can clearly see that benefits of having a sitemap far exceed the inconvenience of creating it. You can create the sitemap yourself. However this can be quite tedious. Luckily, there are software programs that can do the task for us. As a matter of fact, there are many free tools that can ease the creation of sitemaps. Simply do a search for "free sitemap generator" on the major search engines and these free tools can be found.
Auditmypc.com
has an online tool that can create sitemaps from their website. If you are creating a website using Wordpress blogging application, you can install a very useful plugin known as Google Sitemap Generator . This plugin automatically updates and creates a sitemap whenever you update your blog with a new page or blog post.
