Sitemap and its Importance

Sitemap is important whether it is blog or a website to make your websites presence felt in the world of internet. A sitemap is often considered not relevant in the process of building a website, and that is one of the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs. In many websites i have found sitemaps made in html or php, it is better to create a sitemap in xml format. Sitemap is created to inform the search engines that the website has been upated. Search engines will love if you create a sitemap in xml format eg: sitemap.xml in the root folder.

In the earlier days sitemaps are created to inform the user the visitor no of pages in the website, under which sections the pages are organised etc and will be provided a link to that html sitemap from the home page itself. Today the importance of sitemap in a webiste has gone far beyond that. I used to update the xml sitemap when ever i update a website, which helps in indexing all the pages of the website by search engine. As far as my knowledge is concerned Whenever a serach engine crawls a webisite it first looks for robots.txt and sitemap in the root folder. I is advisable to create a sitemap and robots.txt in the root folder for the benefit of the website. If you create a robots.txt keep in mind to provide a link of the sitemap at the end of robots.txt file.

Many webistes are providing the service to create a sitemap of a website in xml format. Search in major search engines with the keyword “create xml sitemap” to find those services.

Below are some of the purposes fulfilled by a sitemap.

1) Navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2) Conveying your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.

3) Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone.

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