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Why Your Website Needs a Sitemap

Written by: Bill Golden

Article Overview: Too many times, sitemaps are thought of as something that is not needed on a website. Maybe it is because the website is too small or maybe there are just too may other important tasks ahead of generating a sitemap. Here, we will learn all about sitemaps, why they are important, and how they can help our websites in the eyes of search engines.

Why Your Website Needs a Sitemap

Too many times, sitemaps are thought of as something that is not needed on a website. Maybe it is because the website is too small or maybe there are just too may other important tasks ahead of generating a sitemap. Here, we will learn all about sitemaps, why they are important, and how they can help our websites in the eyes of search engines.

What is a sitemap? A sitemap or site map is simply a textual map of your website – a way for someone or something to read and navigate around your website, based on the information you present to them. Sitemaps are tools that help others - even beyond menus and navigational systems.

Types of sitemaps. The most common forms of sitemaps are XML, HTML, RSS, ASP, and text.. The best two, in my opinion, are HTML and XML. The HTML form is what you will use on a web page within your site and the XML form is what most search engines look for. Google and Yahoo absolutely use this format and those two search engines have more than a 70% market share regarding search engine queries.

How Sitemaps Help Search Engines. Sitemaps are the roadmap for search engines. Sitemaps enable search engines to much more efficiently index your website because, rather than having to check every single file and folder in yoru website to see if it is something to index or not, they simply follow the directions in the sitemap. Also, Google and Yahoo have special tools that use sitemaps to help them. They provide unique codes that you can add to your index page that identify you to them and help them help you. I am all for complying and using tools offered by Google and Yahoo. I call it, “playing in the Google or Yahoo sandbox.”

Tools for generating sitemaps. Creating any type of sitemap by hand can be somewhat tedious. You have to manually trace links all over your site and then enter links and description information for each page on the site. There are a variety of free and low cost tools for creating sitemaps. The free tools may only make one type of sitemap and may not include debugging options that will help you find broken links in your website. And, by the way, you want to have a “clean” sitemap – one without any broken links.

My favorite free tool is called XENU and you can do search engine query to easily locate it. This tool generates an HTML sitemap that you can reasonably clean up and paste into your website sitemap page. However, it does not generate an XML sitemap, so you will have to find a different freebie to do that. My favorite low-cost tool (and the one I use regularly), is called A1 Sitemap Generator. It is loaded with debugging and analysis features, generates many different types of sitemaps, and allows you to save templates so you can quickly regenerate sitemaps, as needed. As with the free tool, you can reasonably clean up and paste the HTML sitemap into your website sitemap page. The XML sitemap version is ready to go and you can easily drag and drop it into your website.

Maintaining your sitemap. As you add new pages to your website, you will need to update your sitemaps as well. If you had to do some cleanup work on your HTML sitemap, you will find it easier to manually add the new web page information to the sitemap page. You will then need to regenerate a new XML sitemap and upload it to your website.

Tip: This article does not address what a robots.txt file is, but if you are familiar with this file as related to your website, be sure to add a sitemap line that will look like this: Sitemap: your website name/sitemap.xml. Most search engines will check your robots.txt file first and then will use the sitemap file to index your website.

Tip: Sitemap web page “on steroids.” On your HTML sitemap page, you can also add a few short descriptive sentences with each web page description. This additionally helps your human visitors and also provides some additional excellent website content for them to index.

No matter how small your website is, you should have a sitemap. It is expected and is helpful. If this seems overwhelming or too complex, let me know and I will see what I can do to help.

Related Articles
  The Importance of a Sitemap
  Create a Sitemap to Get your Site Indexed
  How a Sitemap Differs From a sitemap
  ••••••>Make sure you have a Valid Updated Sitemap(s) for SEO and Better Web site Navigation
  Understanding Sitemaps and How They Help Your Website

Article Tags: Google, map, page, search engines, site, sitemap, web, website, XML, Yahoo



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