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What Is A Sitemap?

A sitemap can be as small as one page, or span out to become several pages that contains links to every page on your website. Just as the name implies, it is a map that can take not only the site visitor, but a search engine spider to every page your website consists of. For viewer’s looking for a quick find, they might use a the sitemap link if a search box is not present. This will allow them to quickly find what they are looking for and possibly buy from you or sign up for what you have to offer. People in today’s world want their information and they want it fast.

Many web design companies do not even bother creating a sitemap for websites, they feel it is a waste of time and has no design benefits to the website in question. Internet marketers who are looking for that big break often tend to skip this step as well. Either they do not know the importance of a sitemap, or are just to lazy to make one.

One Way To Layout A Sitemap

I prefer to layout my sitemaps in a listed format, breaking down the list into categories and sub-categories. This makes it easy for a site viewer to easily scan over your sitemap to find exactly what they are looking for. It also allows a search engine spider or bot to quickly scan each link on the sitemap page. A generic sitemap would look something like this.

Importance Of A Sitemap

if your website uses javascript menus or even flash navigation menus, then it is highly advisable you create a sitemap for your website.  If a viewer has javascript or flash disabled in their browser, then they will be unable to view your site navigation menu.  Having a sitemap link at the top and or bottom of your site will allow that visitor to still browse through your website.

SEO Benefits Of Having A Sitemap

When you create a sitemap of your website, you are creating a page, or multiple pages that have links to every other page on your website.  To a search engine bot, this is hitting a gold mine of internal site links.  Pages they may have otherwise never found to index, can now be spidered and indexed.  This is why I stated it is a good idea to have your sitemap link on the top or both top and bottom of your website.  With a sitemap link on the top of your page, it will be one of the first things a search engine bot finds since it is at the very top.  These bots start at the bottom of your site and work their way down.  If the page content is extremely long or the page load time is slow, they may never hit your entire page to see a sitemap link at the bottom.  You can take your sitemap and submit it in the Google Webmaster Tools so they have it on file to scan your site.  This will help get those otherwise deeply linked pages be spidered and indexed by Google.

Conclusion

By now you should see the benefits of having a sitemap on your website, how to lay one out, where to put it and how it helps both viewers and search engine bots.  Do not be lazy about this, doing sitemaps by hand can take some time on your part.  If you have a very large website, do a search for free sitemap generators and you can find tools to help automate the process for you.

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