Your Sitemap Is Important

A sitemap is not often considered in the designing of a website, yet in today's Internet arena, it is almost a necessity. Don't just make a sitemap for the sake of having one. When properly planned, your sitemap can be used as a guide for the design, creation and layout of your website.

1) Navigational purposes

A sitemap literally is a map of your site. If your visitor browses your site and becomes lost somewhere in the multitude of pages on your site, they should always be able to refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and to locate where they want to go. Your sitemap should help them navigate through your website with ease and clarity.

2) Conveying your website's theme

When visitors click on your sitemap, they should be able to understand your website's purpose and structure very quickly and easily. This eliminates the need to browse your full site in order to get the complete picture of your site. A properly constructed sitemap will save your visitors' time as well as enhance their understanding of your site.

3) Website optimization

When you create a sitemap, you create one single web page which has links to every other page on your site. Can you imagine what happens when search engine spiders crawl this page? They will follow the links on the sitemap and each page of your site will then get indexed. Google recommends using a sitemap and even helps you construct one on their webmaster's help page. Note that sitemaps need to be placed in your website's home folder in order to be properly utilized by the search engines.

4) Organization and relevance

A sitemap provides you and your visitors a complete overall view of your site structure, and whenever you want to add new content or pages, you'll be able to utilize the sitemap to easily see where the new content should be placed. This will result in a perfectly organized website with each page sorted according to its relevance.

It is especially important to implement a sitemap for websites with a large number of pages. This tool will allow you to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organized for you, your visitors as well as the search engines.

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