Sunday 18 December 2011

Sitemaps Are Essential For SEO and For Visitors Too


A sitemap is important for several reasons. While some may consider having a sitemap redundant, or repetitive, it can help the search engines find some of your deeply nested pages. So it is useful for SEO purposes. It can also aid your visitors by giving them a snapshot of your website – a quick overview.
Here is a rundown of what a sitemap achieves:
1) SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
By creating a sitemap, you are listing links to all the pages on your website. Thus, even deeply nested pages can get crawled by search engine spiders, and then indexed. Obviously, this is a good thing for your seo. Your sitemap should be strategically positioned on the front page of your site.
Having a sitemap where it can be easily found by visitors is clearly optimum.
If you have a large site, you may want to organize your sitemap into logical sections.
2) Conveying your site’s theme
When your visitors come to your site and load up your sitemap, they should instantly know what your site is about. It ought to be readily apparent to them. Pretend you are a visitor (at your site), and take a quick look at your sitemap. Does it accomplish this goal? If not, redo your sitemap.
It will be well worth your time to do so. No sense in wasting your visitors. You want to give them value, and certainly one of the ways of doing this is to save their time.
Also, be sure the links in your sitemap route to the proper web page. You want the navigation to be accurate, so take the time to do this if you are manually constructing your own sitemap.
3) Navigation
A sitemap is a map of your site.
If your visitors come to your site and wind up getting lost in a sea of pages, they can always turn to your sitemap and in a glance see where they are, and go from there. In constructing your sitemap, always keep your visitors in mind. Organize accordingly. Have the most important sections of your website near the top of the sitemap, and be sure your visitor can find mandatory pages such as Privacy Page and Terms of Service.
4) Organization and relevance
A sitemap makes it possible for you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, When you have new pages or sections to add, it will be relatively easy. You can take into account your existing structure – with a mere glance at the sitemap. Thus, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to relevance.
For the above reasons, it is most important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a considerable size. In this way, you’ll be able to satisfy your website visitors and will make your site accessible for search engine spiders. This will benefit your seo and site rankings.

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