A sitemap is a web page which lists and links to all the other pages on a website. It helps users to quickly find other pages and sections of the website. Sitemaps are just like a map of a website, which make navigation easier for its users.
Organized hierarchically, sitemaps show the structure of a website, its sections, links between its sections, and breaks down the information into specific subjects. It is beneficial for your website in a way that it informs search engines about new changes and updates made in a website immediately and pushes the search engines to go directly to the page instead of searching for links through the website. Website owners use sitemaps to get their content recognized by search engines.
Representation of Sitemaps
A sitemap is comprised of anchor links (<a href>) pointing to every page in your site. The anchor text of the link of the targeted page should be phrased according to the theme of the page. Keywords such as the product name or category name can also be used as the key phrase when linking pages from a sitemap.
For a small sized website, one sitemap can easily link to all the pages of the website. This enables every article or web page to be indexed easily by the search engine robots. For larger websites, it is good to set up more than one site map if the number of pages is large. Typically, large sitemaps should be spread on multiple pages to make it easy for the search engines to crawl them.
Once a sitemap is built you will want to link it from all pages using a standard anchor link (<a href>) which is usually placed in the footer of the bottom of the website pages.
XML Sitemaps
There are two kinds of sitemaps which you can make for your website:
HTML based sitemap - This is a simple webpage having links to all other pages of the website like any other page on a website.
XML Sitemaps - XML Sitemaps are used to provide Google and other search engines information about your website. It also lists the URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL so that search engines can more sharply recognize the site and its pages.
How sitemaps help
Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps increase this data to allow crawlers supporting Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the website and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. Sitemaps provide hints for web crawlers to do a better job at getting users to the websites. They also help the users to understand the structure of the website easily so that they can go directly to the information or page which they came for.
August 26th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
[…] information without any delay. This generates customer satisfaction and a better user experience. Sitemaps also help the website visitors to find any information they may be searching for quickly. A search […]
August 27th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
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