The importance of having a sitemap

Posted by Will Blears on October 10, 2008 in SEO Tutorials

Are you fed up of waiting for your web pages to be indexed, does Google seem to be taken ages indexing your web pages then perhaps it is about time to develop and submit a sitemap.

A sitemap is a single web page containing navigational links to every other web page on one website. Take a look at mine for example.

The benefits of submitting a sitemap are:

• Sitemaps make it quicker and easier to have web pages indexed by search engines. Through submitting a sitemap every time you make changes to your website and change the sitemap in accordance to the changes search engines will be informed quicker through the sitemap rather than having to crawl the website to realise there have been some changes made the sitemap will tell the search engines this.

• Sitemaps not only make it easier for search engines to find any new changes that have been made to a website but also make it easier for users of a website to browse and navigate their way through the website. Especially with a website which has hundreds upon hundreds of pages, it can get rather messy in a navigation bar therefore a sitemap is almost essential.

• Sitemaps can also inform search engines of the last date a page was altered, how often your website is updated (daily, weekly, and monthly).

These benefits alone should make it worth taking the time to develop a sitemap, with automated tools you can easily create a sitemap and submit it to Google webmaster tools.

This website will make it easy for you to create a sitemap, http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ this is the website that I have used previously to develop my sitemap.

After you have created a sitemap you can upload and install it on your website and then submit the sitemap to Google webmaster tools here http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

I am really interested in hearing some of your views on sitemaps, whether you feel they are worth the work that you have to put in to them.

I see many websites when surfing the google search results that have not got a sitemap displayed on their website, and often wonder why not, it does not take that long and i believe its well worth it.