Search Engine Optimization is a pragmatic process, although it has changed drastically in the past few years. Be it good content, mobile responsiveness or link building, all of these tricks serve the purpose of increasing a website visibility among the search engine results.Yet there is an important thing that often gets underestimated and that is Sitemap.
The question that arises here is – What is a sitemap ?
As the name suggests, a structured map of your website is known as a sitemap. In other words, a web page showcasing the complete structure of your website is called a sitemap. When it comes to the structure of a website, I am speaking of the various sections involved in your website,for instance the links between the different web pages.
Sitemaps are responsible for making the navigation of a website much easier. An updated sitemap is always good for both users and web crawlers.In fact, sitemaps are a really important specially when it comes to communicating with the search engines.Through your sitemaps, you inform the search engines where you’d like them to go.
Sitemaps had always been an integral part of the best web designing practices, however with the selection of sitemaps via search engines, now they turn out to be considerably more imperative. Nonetheless, it is important to make an note that in case you are keen about sitemaps only from the SEO perspective, you can’t go ahead with the conventional sitemap.However ,as of now Yahoo! and MSN still stick to the standard HTML design. On the contrary,Google sitemaps use a unique (XML) based format which is not quite the same as the normal HTML sitemap for the human visitors.
One may inquire as to why two sitemaps are vital. The answer is self-evident – one is for humans, the other is for spiders.As per the current situation Googlebot is predominating, although it is quite possible that different crawlers will join the club without further ado. Going with the flow, you can make a note that making use of even two sitemaps is not viewed as redundant content.
Why Use a Sitemap
Utilizing sitemap has numerous advantages apart from the obvious one’s such as easy to navigate site and better perceivability via search engines. Sitemaps offer the chance to advise search engines quickly about any progressions on your site. Obviously, you can’t expect that search engines will surge immediately to index your modified pages, however, the progressions will be indexed faster, in comparison to not having a sitemap.
Additionally, when you have a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, you depend less on external links that will connect search engines to your site. Sitemaps can even help with muddled internal links for occurrence provided you coincidentally have broken internal links or stranded pages that can’t be reached in other way.