Benefits of Sitemaps

December 7, 2009 on 4:34 pm | In Search Engine Optimization |
by SEO Houston

Many SEO tips are out there that can help you optimize your website but one of the most underestimated of these tips is sitemap generation. A Sitemap, as the name implies, is just a map of your site showing its structure broken down into sections and the links between them. Sitemaps are a way of making the navigation of your site easier for both the search engines and the users. While robots.txt are used to tell the search engines which part or parts of your website to be excluded from indexing, your sitemap is used to tell the search engines where you'd like them to go.

Sitemaps have always been a part of best Web design practices but now that the search engines have adopted them, sitemaps are now even more important. It is important to note that Yahoo! and Bing still support the standard html format sitemaps, however, Google now uses special Extendible Markup Language, or XML sitemaps that is different from the html sitemap for human users. With that being said, for SEO purposes you can’t just only use the conventional sitemap if you want your site to be successful.

Being said, I want to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In Google Webmaster tools help it explicitly states that you will never be penalized by Google for using sitemaps.

Why Use a Sitemap

Not only do sitemaps provide easier navigation and better search engine visibility, but they also immediately inform search engines about any changes on your website. Now we all know the search engines won’t immediately swoop right in to index the changes but we do know that the changes will be indexed much faster than if you did not have a sitemap.

If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new (or recently updated pages), then using a sitemap can be vital to your success. Although you can still go without a sitemap, it is likely that soon sitemaps will become the standard way of submitting a site to search engines. Though it is certain that spiders will continue to index the Web and sitemaps will not make the standard crawling procedures obsolete, it is logical to say that the importance of sitemaps will continue to increase.

Keep in mind that using sitemaps may not produce huge advantages right away but as the search engines improve their sitemap indexing algorithms, it is expected that more and more sites will be indexed fast through the use of sitemaps.

Magnetiks Search Marketing, The SEO experts in Houston, Texas, specializes in Website optimization from small and medium sized businesses. We utilize SEO best practices including sitemap generation and submission. For more information on turning your business website into your best online sales person call 281-362-9855 today!