Sitemaps - Crucial For Indexing Purposes

A sitemap is often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you make a sitemap just for the sake of having one. By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.

Here are the main reasons why you would consider building a sitemap into your website:

1) Navigational purposes

A sitemap is as it states, a map of your site. If your the visitors browsing your site get lost amongst the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.

2) Conveying your site's theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they can see the full extent of the content available on your site. They may even find another area of the site they want to explore thus keeping them onsite for longer. This will give you more opportunities to sell to them.

3) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.

4) Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every other page on your website. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page, they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.

5) Sitemap Submission

You can submit your sitemap directly to Google or Yahoo. On Google just goto Webmaster Tools and login. It will bring up a list of your websites and from here you can navigate to sitemaps and add the latest sitemap to your Google account. This basically tells Google where all your pages are and it is generally downloaded by Google within the hour. Can you think of an easier way to get your sites individual pages indexed?

The above reasons, detail the importance of generating a sitemap, whether it be a web page or a standalone file that can be uploaded to Google. In addition a sitemap helps to organise each website project, especially the big sites and provides ease of navigation to your visitors. Without a sitemap you are missing a major marketing shortcut.

Steve Sharpe is the CEO & Editor in Chief of http://www.informationbooth.net and http://www.articleland.co.uk. He has been in internet marketing for a number of years and can be reached for further information at his websites.