Sitemap
What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is a visual or textually organized model of a Web site’s content that allows the users to navigate through the site.
Web site sitemaps help people navigate. A sitemap is a kind of listing the contents, in which each listed item links directly to its counterpart sections of the Web site. Each of these listings is linked to their relevant pages. It can be extremely helpful to have a sitemap when you have a lot of pages. Many sitemaps contain a search function too, which can be accessed from the site map or the home page in order to allow people to search for key terms.
A sitemap help search engine index and rank your pages. HTML sitemaps help search engines find and index all pages on your Web site. This is especially important if a site uses a dynamic access to content such as Adobe Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links. If you make sure all links in your HTML sitemap use keyword rich anchor text, you also improve chances for having your pages ranked high in search engine result pages for relevant search terms.
Create your sitemap.
When designing a HTML sitemap for your web site, whether manually or using a HTML sitemap generator program, you have to make it easy to use while a HTML sitemap primarily should focus on helping human visitors navigate your web site.
There are some things you can do to optimize it for search engines as well:
- Web site structure. Make sure you use meaningful keywords in your directory, file names and URLs throughout your web site.
- Page titles. All page titles in your web site must be unique and contain relevant keywords because it really helps sitemap generator programs creating HTML sitemaps with relevant anchor text in links.
- Linking your Web site sitemap. If you have all pages in your Web site link to your web site sitemap, you ensure search engines to follow links in your sitemap index them. This can help you get new pages faster and higher ranked into search engine result pages.
What are the Web sites that will generate sitemap automatically?
As you add new pages to your Web site, be sure to add them to your sitemap. Search engines will reward Web site with fresh and up-to-date content. A sitemap enables search engines to quickly find those Web pages recently added to your site.
Sitemap submission.
Once you’ve created a Sitemap you can submit it to search engines. XML sitemaps are submitted by filling out a form on the search engine’s submission page. Web developers can submit a sitemap directly and not wait for search engines to find it.