When it comes to optimizing websites, many people forget or underestimate the importance of sitemaps. Sitemaps website is a guide through your website that is given on a single page. It shows the structure of the website indicating the sections and how they are linked.
The importance of sitemaps to make it easier for users and search engines to navigate your website. They are an important tool when it comes to communication with search engines. Search engine robots use sitemaps to determine what should be indexed and what shouldn’t.
The benefits of using sitemaps :
- Easier navigation Sitemaps provide users and search engines with the structural layout of your entire website. This makes it easier for search engines and users to find relevant information.
- Improved visibility SEO is all about increasing visibility to search engines and therefore users. The importance of sitemaps for search engine robots is to navigate your website and find relevant content. These robots then determine what should be indexed by search engines. This increases the visibility of your content through internal links. You can rely less on external links to gain visibility with search engines.
- Easier to make changes Have you made changes to your website? Importance creates sitemaps to ensure search engines are aware of these changes for better indexing of your website. Sitemaps will help to ensure that your website is properly indexed by making these changes apparent to search engine robots. These changes are indexed faster therefore leaving little room for broken links or error pages.
Steps to an effective sitemap
- Generate the sitemap There are two main ways of doing this:
- Using a sitemap generator: You download a sitemap generator and install it e.g. Google sitemap generator. This will generate the sitemap for you. These may be more difficult to use depending on your technical skills
- Using a sitemap generation tool available online: There are various tools available online that can help you generate a sitemap without having to install them on your computer. Many of these tools are free. However, many are unverified and untested. It is therefore importance create sitemaps to be careful when using them.
- Upload sitemap After generating the sitemap, verify that it is a true representation of your website then upload it to your website.
- Inform Google Notify Google of the inclusion of a sitemap. You can do this by adding it to your Google Sitemaps account if you have one. If you don’t have one, make a point of opening one. Having a sitemaps account also helps in verifying that you own the website.Check with other search engines to determine if they support sitemaps and ensure that your website complies with their requirements. Sitemaps are a powerful tool for SEO. You can’t afford to ignore them.
So if you already know the importance of sitemaps for your website and still have a trouble to generate sitemaps our team will help you. Don’t hesitate to contact us.
