Importance of Sitemaps in SEO

What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is a webpage that contains links for all pages a website has. If the site is huge, the sitemap may provide a view of general categories, not to each page, but to pages under certain subject headings. Link for sitemap page is often provided at the main page of a website.

Types of a Sitemap

There are two types of sitemaps:

• HTML sitemap
• XML sitemap

Both types of sitemaps are important for result oriented search engine optimization. An HTML sitemap provides a links for all the pages of a website. However an XML sitemaps guides search engine to crawl the pages of a website.

HTML Sitemaps

An HTML sitemap is a single HTML page that contains links to all the pages of your website. HTML sitemap is equally important for human visitors as well as search engines to browse your website completely. Link for HTML sitemap is often placed at the header or footer of a website.

If a website is huge or complex, an HTML sitemap helps visitors to reach the page they are looking for. From an SEO perspective, as the search engine’s robot (or spider) crawls your site indexing pages, it may find some pages on your site easier using this sitemap, rather than through the general navigation.

XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps are created specifically for the search engines. All of the most popular search engines including Google, Yahoo and Ask.com utilize XML sitemaps as part of their process for indexing the pages of a website.
A well composed XML sitemap will tell the search engine what pages are in your site, how often those pages are updated, and when they were last modified. Using XML sitemap, search engines know which pages to revisit more regularly, and are likely to do a better job of indexing them.

Why Sitemaps are Crucial for SEO

Creating an HTML sitemap and a XML sitemap for your website could be the easiest thing you do to enhance your exposure on the web. Submitting your website’s sitemaps on search engines surely helps to get you onto the first page of Google’s results. If you haven’t yet submitted your website’s sitemap to search engines means your website’s existence on World Wide Web is probably not yet recorded.

Creating HTML sitemaps is as easy as creating a basic HTML page that contains links to all the pages in your site. However, you need to keep in mind that whenever you create new pages in your site, you will want to add those links on the sitemap as well.

You should be in the habit of submitting a sitemap to search engines a number of times a year. This allows you to update the search engine on any new pages in your site. If you create new pages on a regular basis, you may want to submit your sitemap more frequently to make the search engine spider visit your website regularly.

Conclusion

You will most likely find your search engine rankings climb after submitting a sitemap for the first time. Both HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps are a good step in the right direction to improve your website’s exposure.