Noteworthiness of a Sitemap in your SEO Strategy

Imagine you have a website, how do you see and know the details of it? By visiting the website and browsing its details, right? Now think how does a Search Engine read your website? Is it the same way? Absolutely Not!

Search Engines have developed different algorithms to read the information of your website and index it in their system accordingly. This search engine algorithm has a crawler that visits your website and reads it, understands it and report it back. Most of the websites have more than just one page, unless it’s a Single-Page Website.

So is there a way for me to reach out to these Search Engine crawlers and provide them a list of all my webpages within the website? Of course there is, that’s called a sitemap.

So basically, a sitemap is a list of webpages of a website which are fed and made accessible to the Search Engine crawlers. This will help speed things up while ranking and indexing each and every page of your website. As the name suggests, sitemap is a clear map of all the webpages of the website accessible by the Search Engines through its crawlers.

Links of any website gives vital information of the webpage’s content, that is the reason you need to name the URLs of the website very carefully, calculatedly and smartly in your SEO campaign. A sitemap connects the URLs and the content of the webpage. Sitemaps can exhibit navigation, organization and labelling system.

Sitemaps also makes your website’s presentation attractive on Search Engines as displayed in the following image:

Sitemaps can be submitted to the Search Engines in two formats: XML and HTML

XML sitemap is explicitly written for Search Engine crawlers. The intention is to allow the crawler to quickly and easily extract all the important information about your website through an XML file.

On the other hand, an HTML sitemap is helpful to show directions to lost website visitors (human users) to find pages on your website that they are looking for. Search Engines always ranks a site higher on the basis of its user friendliness. Hence, the easier the website is for a visitor, the higher the Search Engines rank it.

In a press release, Search Engine leaders Google shed some light on the importance of Sitemaps with the following statement:

If your site’s pages are properly linked, our web crawlers can usually discover most of your site. Even so, a sitemap can improve the crawling of your site, particularly if your site meets one of the following criteria…

In the “following criteria” section, Search Engine leaders meant of these:

1. New Websites.
2. Large Websites.
3. Websites with Rich Media content.
4. Websites with a lot of content that is not properly linked.

This covers most of the websites. Hence, we at Marcabees would suggest to each and every website owner to create a sitemap and submit it to the Search Engines.