A sitemap is a web page that lists all the web pages on a website, typically organized in hierarchical way. Sitemap helps visitors and search engine bots to find pages on the site.
Sitemaps improves search engine optimization of a website by making sure that all the pages can be found. Sitemap is very important when a website uses flash or script menus that do not include HTML links.
What is Google Sitemap?
(1). The objective of sitemaps is simple to provide website owners with a method of getting more pages in Google’s index and notifying Google about any recent updates. The problem with this is that Google is already fairly competent at indexing the majority of a website and predicting when a site is going to update itself. The result is that most website owners found it to be a lot of work for relatively little benefit.
(2). A final point to the importance of a sitemap – Google in its Webmaster Guidelines recommends that sites should have a sitemap.
(3). Google sitemap is a tool established by Google to arrange an entire website in index order and keeping the latest update information on a website, easier on search engine. By adding a list of all the pages on your website, along with when those pages were last updated Google is able to easily update in its index.
How to arrange Search Engine Friendly Sitemap?
(1). Give your visitors the information about your site and show them how to reach the page they are looking for.
(2).To help automatic search engine robot about what the page is about, write important keyword phrases in the sitemap text and hypertext links.
(3).Help search engine robots to find by giving link of static web pages instead of link to dynamically generated pages. The search engine may not otherwise find your page.
(4).Having text links of most important pages, it may have links to every page.
(5).Write short description related to link to inform visitor about your website.
(6).Provide a pathway for the search engine robots to follow in order to reach your most important web pages.
(7).It is also very important for the sitemap to be in the main site directory so search engine spiders can easily find sitemap page and follow the links to promise your main site content is instantly accessible to spiders and visitors.
(8).Other important aspects in sitemaps, the link color for visited links should be different from that of non visited links so that visitors understand which pages they have by now seen and thus, save time and sustain interest of visitor in your website.
(9).It is good habit to have sitemap even for small website, adding a sitemap for visitors and for the search engine robots becomes the part of in general search engine optimization plan.
(10).To makes your sitemap most attractive to the search engine robots and visitors it is better to include meaningful text along with the page URLs and links. Use keywords in that text including suitable content for each of the pages to which you link.
(11).Try to create easy navigation of your site; it is easy for search engine robots to find on your site, it add to chances of being positively listed in their search results. Having a number of properly interlinked web pages within a website would point to to the search engine that the information structural design of the site is reliable and this would help you to attain Top ranking in search engine.
A sitemap also assists you in planning your site before even you start rising it. Once you decide which pages you want, your job is in fact made very simple when you start designing the web pages. A site structure helps in sympathetic the number of pages on the website and how they would be laid out. Thus, another important point is that a sitemap should in fact be the first step in planning for a website. Therefore the other most vital reason the sitemap is vital because it helps the visitors to appreciate the website structure and layout and thus, quickly gain right of entry to what your website has to offer.
