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Importance of Sitemaps In SEO
So, you are on the prowl again for an elusive or uncommon SEO tip or trick that can win you accolades from the Search engines? Have we got a tip for you…(wink wink)
The sitemap is, arguably, one of the most underestimated SEO tips for new and existing webmasters - with major importance. And, just as the name implies, a “Sitemap” is a single page that explains the structure of your website for search engine spiders/robots. The main function of a sitemap is to guide the search engine spider through all of your sites content, simply and using a easy to decipher XML format. This enables the maximum amount of pages/data crawled – without getting lost in the maze of pages code, javascript etc. One important thing to note is after creating a sitemap is to always update it - an outdated sitemap is not worth much ;).
So, who does this help? My site is already in the Google and Yahoo index?
Well, it helps you. Period. If you update your sitemap just as regularly as you update your website, you will find that search engines will ‘fall in love with your website’ while visitors will be swarming it for more juicy and latest information/services or products. Simply said, sitemaps are a very easy yet effective way of communication your fresh content with search engines. Just as you tell the search robots which parts of your site to include or exclude in robots.txt, a sitemap will naturally guide the search robots to he particular pages (you say are important) to a visitor.
Now that we have established the importance of sitemaps, you need to know some other things related to it for SEO purposes. A conventional sitemap holds no water as far as Google is concerned. You may get lucky with Yahoo! and MSN as they consider the standard HTML format for sitemaps. Google on the other hand used XML format which is completely different from the standard HTML format that most sites have for visitors belonging to the human race! Well, Google simply has to do things differently.
So, you need to have two sitemaps – one for the Googlebot and one for human visitors. Also, Google has stated that it doesn’t consider two sitemaps as duplicate content and therefore, you will not be penalized for this SEO practice! Besides the obvious two benefits – one being easier navigation and increased visibility through search engines, sitemaps also act as the messengers of latest news/changes made on your website. They tell search engine robots about the changes made on your site and help them index the pages faster as compared to when your web site doesn’t have sitemaps.
One of the best benefits of utilizing sitemaps for SEO purposes is that when you submit a sitemap to a search engine, your reliance on external links becomes very less. And, you offer the search engine robots another way to find your site for indexing.
Once you have added a sitemap on your site and submitted it to SEs as well, you can use the SEOiQ Testing Center on our website, that allows you to compare your site’s PageRank, Backlinks, total pages indexed, Compete Rank, Alexa Rank, and Technorati Rank to know how it fares against your closest competitors and to see where you stand in the industry.
For more information on how to use the Sitemaps for search engine optimization purposes and to use the SEOiQ Testing Center features, take advantage of our 14-day free trial by signing up now!
By Jeremy Hermanns | September 6, 2008 | Filed Under SEO Advice
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