Sitemaps are one more advanced SEO technique you can use to make it easier for search engines to index your site.

A sitemap is a list of pages on your website.

The simplest definition of a sitemap is a file where the links to all your pages are gathered in one place.

Some people consider sitemap redundant in the process of building a website, but understanding the importance of a sitemap will help you to know the importance and how it relates to your type of site.

Sitemap acts as a map of your site because it has the complete hierarchical structure of your site. It sorts your folder structure in order of relevancy and maps out tier one, tier two, tier three or more that belongs to a particular tree structure.

It helps to guide you whenever you need to make some changes to your site structure to determine the order your files should follow – it’s like some kind of dependencies and can be used by your visitor to navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

Sitemap helps to convey your site’s theme to your visitors with the minimum time possible without having to go through all your pages. This is especially importance when you have traditional websites or content website with lots of pages to navigate.

Sitemap is especially beneficial when the search engine robots follow a tread to your site and are able to follow the links on the sitemap to every pages of your site and get them indexed.

It is particularly helpful if you have a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or that are not linked at all.

 

Important sitemap points

Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that search engines know about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discovered by search engine’s normal crawling process.

Creating a sitemap does not guarantee that your site will be automatically indexed, and you are not penalized for not having a sitemap either.

Sitemap helps the search engines to know about your pages, how often the pages on your site changes – information about your updates.

There are sites which have SEO success without a sitemap but if you want to do things in a more professional way, or if you have a site with hundreds or thousands of pages, consider making a sitemap and submitting it to search engines.

There are many tools you can use for generating a site map. Additionally, there are several sitemap formats, so before you start generating your sitemap, check which formats and tools the search engine you are targeting is recommending.

Specialized search engines (i.e., engines, which index content from particular categories only) can also help you get more traffic. There are thousands of specialized search engines and if you research the search engines for your niche, you will most likely find tens of suitable ones.

Sitemap can be as simple as creating an index to show how things relates to each other on your website or you can use some visual aid to create it like Google’s site map I found on Wikipedia. Read more about Search Engine Optimization and how it can help bring more traffic to your site.

If you want to learn more about what a site map is, check this URL:

http://www.sitemaps.org/faq.php