Sitemaps and How They Help Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Efforts

Sitemaps (site maps) are dedicated pages on a website that list links to all other pages and alert Search Engine spiders and website visitors to all pages on a website. This is a website’s blueprint and a simple, well-structured site map will benefit website visitors by giving them access to all pages in a concise layout. Search Engines have to crawl through millions and millions of websites and a sitemap makes it easy for the Search Engine crawlers to find every available page for a website in one place. This is particularly important if a website’s navigation is made up of images, flash or other code that is not readable by Search Engines. The sitemap is always a wonderful tool to guide your websites web development. It can be thought of as an outline of the site guiding how the site should be built, organize which pages are the most important and the number of pages a site will have initially.

Google itself mentions that sitemaps are useful if a website’s pages are difficult to discover for search engine spiders, and if a website is newer and has few inbound links or if a website contains a vast archive of content pages that are poorly or not linked to.

There are two ways of publishing sitemaps, either in XML or HTML form. HTML sitemaps can usually be found somewhere on a live website (for example, a “Sitemap” link at the bottom of a website) and help website (human) visitors navigate a site. An HTML style sitemap is typically organized in a hierarchical manner and makes browsing an entire site easy from one page. A XML sitemap can be used to directly inform crawlers of a site's structure. The XML form was developed originally by Google, but now all four major Search Engines, Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask, utilize the XML site map. The XML style site map was developed for websites with a great amount of dynamic pages accessible only by forms, searches, and other mechanized techniques to program searching for a page on a particular site. Sitemaps can help visitors and Search Engine crawlers reach deeper pages within a site. Online business websites can be comprised of hundreds of catalogues and product pages, bloggers who post more than once a day and community type forum and message board sites are examples of websites that would greatly benefit from a XML sitemap. Besides containing all available pages of a site, XML site maps can also provide information such as how frequently a site is updated and the most recent date changes were made.

A sitemap is important to a search engine optimization campaign because it easily allows the Search Engines to crawl and index all available pages of a website. This will maximize the amount of content and meta data (two key factors in ranking within the Search Engines) available for the Search Engines to rank a website within their results pages. In an industry where “content is king” the more content able to be indexed and ranked, the better. If possible, instead of simply listing URLs on the sitemap, take this opportunity to utilize important keywords as anchor text for the links on the sitemap. Also if possible, try to describe the contents of the page underneath its dedicated link.