Approach an SEO professional and that person will tell you ‘n’ number of things that can’t be missed but sometimes even SEO people also missed this important aspect of search engine optimization and that is a sitemap. Sitemap, as the name suggests, is a map of a website (literally speaking). Technically speaking, sitemap is a page where you show the structure of your site, its pages with sub pages, if any, links between these pages, etc. A sitemap make navigation of site easier and it must be updated from time to time to keep it search engine friendly. Search engine spiders and bots easily understand the site structure and pages with the help of sitemap. There are billions of web pages that are stored in the search engine database and you can easily calculate how much time crawler gets to read new pages and changes in each and every existed webpage. I would say a couple of seconds. You can also add robots.txt file to tell search engines which part of your site to index, to follow and to archive.
Sometimes sitemaps are not taken seriously. However, submitting a sitemap has always been part of white hat techniques. It is important to note that you cannot go with conventional sitemap because from SEO point of view, an XML sitemap must be there in your website and from user point of view, and HTML based sitemap is important. An XML sitemap is search engine friendly and HTML sitemap is user friendly comprised of plain text links easy to understand.
Yahoo! and MSN still support the HTML format while XML format is friendlier for Google bots. Now the question arises why two sitemaps? The answer is obvious- one for humans and the other for spiders and bots. I mean to say HTML format for human visitors and XML format for spiders and bots. Having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content.
Having sitemap is always a win-win situation; it not only offers easier navigation and better visibility by search engines but also offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any update on your site. I mean to say the indexing will be faster than the routine indexing. During Google dance and deep crawling, with the help of sitemap the crawler can index up to secondary and tertiary levels of your website.
There are two ways to generate a sitemap- to download and install a sitemap generator or to use an online sitemap generation tool. The first is more difficult but it is in your control and the second option is a bit difficult as you’ll download the software first then install it and plug-ins will also be there. Comparably, the second is easier in case if you do not know the coding. There are lots of online sitemap generating software available on World Wide Web which will do the rest for you. Once you create the sitemap, you need to upload it to your site and notify the search engines about its existence. That is the most important step of the whole process.
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