There are millions of websites on the internet and your site is just like a drop in the ocean of informative websites. Imagine having the various search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing to search your site and indexing it, having a sitemap in your website would be a great help.

What exactly is a Sitemap?

  • According to Wikipedia: A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.
  • Typically you may use an html format page to show your visitors the roadmap of your website or a XML format file for the search engine.
  • Just think of Sitemap as a roadmap showing all your visitors where to find all the pages on your site.

What role does a Sitemap plays?

  • Sitemap is like your site informer that tells the search engines about pages on your site that are available for crawling and indexing. It acts like traffic a police that directs your visitors to all the various pages on your site.
  • Web crawlers normally find pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps complement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. In a nut shell it helps the web crawlers do a better job crawling your site.

Why is it important and the benefit of having a Sitemap?

  • If you have a site built in Flash and other non-html languages, it is important to have a Sitemap as web crawlers ignore such sites.
  • Visitors can become confused in a site with lots of pages and contents. They can review your Sitemap and find directions.
  • Google and other search engines may not fully index certain large sites and even some smaller ones. The robots may follow a link that is broken or lead them away from your site. This leaves some pages not fully indexed and these pages will not show on search results. So you may want to help the robots by having a Sitemap.
  • Google do not penalize or stop crawling a site without sitemap but having one will be helpful.

How do you create a Sitemap for your site?

  • There is a great site called XML-Sitemaps.com. They provide free online Sitemap Generator where you can create a Sitemap for your site.
  • Using this site is very easy with just 4 Simple Steps and you are done.

How do you submit a Sitemap to Google?

  • The best way in submitting a XML Sitemaps with Google is to have a Google Webmaster Tools account and submit your XML Sitemap through that account.
  • Google Webmaster Tools give you a wealth of information from their feedback. You can find loads of information like Search Queries, Crawl Errors, Links to your site, Keywords and etc.

What Google said about sitemap?

Google, John Mueller said in a Google Webmaster Help post:

“With a site of small size, you don’t really need a Sitemap file, we’ll generally be able to crawl and index everything regardless. Also, with such a small Sitemap file, you can just check the individual URLs to see if they’re indexed like that.”

So as conclusion, a Sitemap is likely to improve the indexing of your site pages by search engines. If your site is small and you have all your internal links mapped out efficiently, then most probably you don’t need a Sitemap. For more complex sites with lots of pages and linking depths, Sitemap is useful.  But it is not the requisite for getting indexed.

Article courtesy of  Malaysia website company.