Sitemaps Benefits

While a glossy site full of engaging images, compelling content and attractive products is great for potential customers, it is of no use if invisible on the web. To address this problem many businesses enlist the help of a professional search engine optimisation (SEO) firm with a view to optimising their website and in turn climb the search engine rankings. This is a good process and one which can produce top positions and long-lasting visibility for your site, but there are a few things all website owners should be doing to give themselves the best chances of visibility.

Top Position's website offers a wealth of information on optimising your site and making it work for you, but here we are going to address an underappreciated resource, one that all website owners can access easily, and one which will help your SEO - the sitemap.

A sitemap is exactly what the name suggests - a list of the pages on a website accessible to users or spiders (spiders, or 'robots', are the software programmes the search engines use to scan your site and make an assessment of where is should place in web rankings). This document shows the various pages on your site in relation to each other and where they feature in the grand scheme of your site; this basically makes the sitemap a general top-down view of the overall site contents. This overview of the sites contents will also indicate which pages link to each other, and you can think of this as a sort of table of contents which shows visitors to your site what they can expect to find. For a good illustration of a straightforward yet comprehensive sitemap take a look at the Topposition website (below).

The first thing to say on why you should have a sitemap relates to the exact reason you have tried so hard to present an attractive, informative and accessible site in the first place - to enhance the user's experience. This is the pivotal point of any customer orientated service and the point to which any website owner should direct their main efforts.

As your website grows, you must update your sitemap. This will enable visitors to know what content is being added to you site, encouraging them to return. If this isn't reason enough to create a sitemap, read on.

Sitemaps also help you achieve a better organic ranking by making sure that all of the pages on your site can be found. If you have inaccessible pages your site will appear restrictive to the search engine spiders and they will not award you as high a ranking as you perhaps deserve. Further to this a sitemap helps with the internal architecture of a site, and this in turn can positively affect SEO. By expanding the capacity of internal linking a sitemap boosts your search engine optimisation efforts without any labour intensive directory work or external link building activities. After all, if your site isn't going to help itself in the SEO stakes then it isn't working hard enough.

So, know we've decided that you definitely do want to include a sitemap on your website let's look at how you might go about doing this. The simple answer is, as with much of this technical web stuff - ask Google. Google have a whole Webmasters resource which offers all you need, in simple steps, to create a fully working sitemap, but just in case you encounter any problems the correct file format for a sitemap is .XML.

Ultimately sitemaps will enhance the user's experience and enable search engines to make a full and fair assessment of your site, and this will in turn help your SEO. It's one of these things that may not seem immediately important when setting up a site, as usually sitemaps are included as a very small link at the bottom of a homepage, but for your site to develop and become a leading force in your field it is absolutely essential.