SITEMAP – MUST FOR A WEBSITE
To start with, “What is a sitemap?” and “Why is it so important?”
A sitemap is like a map which contains details such as the different pages in a website, categories, URLs, etc., of a website. The sitemap is generated and submitted to search engines so that it is easy for the search engines to crawl our website, and get the required information.
The two important reasons behind the need for Sitemaps are as follows,
1. To enable the visitor to find the right page or content.
2. To help search engines to index.
If we generate a sitemap, the visitors can easily navigate through the pages instead of going through link after link. For Example: Just imagine that there is a page called as “contact info,” and this contact info is under “About us” page. If there is a sitemap, then the visitor can directly go into the contact info page instead of coming through “About Us” page. You can easily access the important pages quickly with one click. Big player’s websites such as hp.com, ecommerce sites, are few examples where sitemaps really helps.
A sitemap makes search engine crawler’s job to be easy. The spider or the crawler will easily understand the website’s structure and get back to the DB with all the required information that it needs. We can create a sitemap within minutes. Thus, if you wish to get your website indexed and want to be search engine friendly, then you need to create a sitemap and submit it to the search engines. This is one of the basic processes of search engine optimization.
There are different types of Sitemaps such as,
1. Html sitemap: Hierarchy of the website links list for visitor’s quick access.
2. XML sitemap: Generate for search engines to inform about URL’s.
3. ROR sitemap: Sitemap used to describe about object in the website.
4. Video sitemap: Sitemap contains links to a videos landing page along with info.
5. Geo sitemap: To be searchable in Google maps about our geo content.
6. News sitemap: More useful for large sites.
To know more about sitemap creation, submission, and its importance, just click the below link,
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/12/sitemap-submission-made-simple.html