The Importance of a Sitemap for Your Website

A sitemap is a tool utilized by web-developers to organize their website’s content. It can be useful for any size website however, it is best used with a larger site. A site map is like an organizational tree but for a webpage. It will list the homepage and other pages will branch from that to build an organizational tree. If done properly, this is a wonderful tool used by search engines such as Google to direct potential clients to the correct page they are searching for. Since Google uses complex algorithms to index pages, it is not guaranteed to generate more hits on a specific page, but it does carry the potential to. For example, a customer looking for ‘SITENAME login’ could be directed to the login page vice the homepage where they then have to search for a customer login. A website such as a news company may use a sitemap to assist newsreaders to locating specific articles. Searching through thousands of articles day by day is a tedious task. Searching date and keyword is not.

A sitemap can also help improve traffic flow of the page by linking to larger external sites. Since a larger site exists because it has more hits, some of these hits will be redirected to the smaller site via the sitemap. Metadata used in conjunction with a sitemap is a very powerful tool. The use of metadata associated with each page will generate more hits for the page, and the sitemap will allow users to accurately find the exact page they are looking for without the hassle of searching through multiple links or full pages.

Lastly, a sitemap may also be used to organize image and video entries. Accompanied with metadata, a sitemap could be used to archive and retrieve by parameters such as subject matter, type, license, length, video running time, category, and more. The possibilities are truly limitless. Not included in most descriptions of a sitemap, is how easy it makes fixing or editing a page to be. A sitemap may assist the web designer to quickly find a reported broken or missing webpage, fix a typo or add content.

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