Importance of sitemap for website promotion

A sitemap is a web page that lists all the web pages on a website, typically organized in hierarchical way. Sitemap helps visitors and search engine bots to find pages on the site.

The sitemap provides quick finding for search engine robot. Depending on the size of your website, it may actually link to all of your pages. This means that once the robot finds the sitemap page, it can visit each and every page on your entire website. It is good to have all the content included in the search engine database of your website and it will result in possibility for good ranking in search engine result pages when someone performing a search related to your topic.

Sitemaps improves search engine optimization of a website by making sure that all the pages can be found. Sitemap is very important when a website uses flash or script menus that do not include HTML links.

How to prepare Search Engine Friendly Sitemap?

• Having text links of most important pages, it may have links to every page.
• Write short description related to link to inform visitor about your website.
• Provide a pathway for the search engine robots to follow in order to reach your most important web pages.
• Give your visitors the information about your site and show them how to reach the page they are looking for.
• To help automated search engine robot about what the page is about, write important keyword phrases in the sitemap text and hypertext links.
• Help search engine robots to find by giving link of static web pages instead of link to dynamically generated pages. The search engine may not otherwise find your page.
• It is good habit to have sitemap even for small website, adding a sitemap for visitors and for the search engine robots becomes the part of overall search engine optimization strategy.
• To make your sitemap most attractive to the search engine robots and visitors it is better to include meaningful text along with the page URLs and links. Use keywords in that text including appropriate content for each of the pages to which you link.
• Try to make easy navigation of your site; it is easy for search engine robots to find on your site, it increases chances of being positively listed in their search results. Having a number of properly interlinked web pages within a website would indicate to the search engine that the information architecture of the site is reliable and this would help you to achieve Top ranking in search engine.
• It is also very important for the sitemap to be in the main site directory so search engine spiders can easily find sitemap page and follow the links to assure your main site content is instantly accessible to spiders and visitors.
• Other important aspects in sitemaps, the link color for visited links should be different from that of non visited links so that visitors understand which pages they have already seen and thus, save time and sustain interest of visitor in your website.

What is Google Sitemap?

• Google sitemap is a tool established by Google to arrange an entire website in index order and keeping the latest update information on a website, easier on search engine. By adding a list of all the pages on your website, along with when those pages were last updated Google is able to easily update in its index.
• The goal of sitemaps is simple to provide website owners with a method of getting more pages in Google's index and notifying Google about any recent updates. The problem with this is that Google is already fairly competent at indexing the majority of a website and predicting when a site is going to update itself. The result is that most website owners found it to be a lot of work for relatively little benefit.
• A final point to the importance of a sitemap - Google in its Webmaster Guidelines recommends that sites should have a sitemap.

A sitemap also helps you in planning your site before even you start developing it. Once you decide which pages you want, your job is actually made very simple when you start designing the web pages. A site structure helps in understanding the number of pages on the website and how they would be laid out. Thus, another important point is that a sitemap should actually be the first step in planning for a website.

Therefore the other most important reason the sitemap is vital because it helps the visitors to understand the website structure and layout and thus, quickly gain access to what your website has to offer.

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