The Importance of a Sitemap

Why is it important to have a sitemap?

A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a website accessible to crawlers or users. It helps user to navigate your sites as it provides listing of pages available on your sites. It can also be structured to show by category and archives. Sitemap is important from SEO point of view. What I understood is  that it helps the search engine to crawls through your site.

So, why do you need a sitemap?

1) You need it for navigation purposes

A sitemap literally acts as a map of your site. If your sites is big with many pages, then having a sitemap is very usefel. If your visitors browses through your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with ease.

2) To Convey your site’s theme

When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist or essence of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time. That’s is why you might want to consider having your sitemap structured to show categorized sections of your pages.. It will definitely help your users and it will be more pleasing to their eyes

3) Site optimization purposes

When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site. Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website. For a wordpress site, plugins such as Google Sitemap and Dagon Design Sitemap Generator will help you in the the sitemap creation and you I suggest you try it out

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance. A sitemap can be very simple but it can also be very complex. If you are really into it, you can even create a graphical or visual sitemap using tools such as paintshop, photoshops or mind mapping software.

Ok.. if you site is still lacking of sitemap, why not try to create one now? It will not only make you site more organized but also make it easily accessible to your visitor.

Have fun!

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