• What are sitemaps?
• How sitemaps work
• How sitemaps help your SEO needs

What Are Sitemaps?

Have you ever studied and followed directions given on a map to get to a particular destination? That is what website sitemaps do for your search engines intending to crawl or index your websites. Sitemaps make it easier for search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo among others to index your website and determine which content is more important in relation to others.

Furthermore, a sitemap is a web protocol that enables website contents to be organized more efficiently so that humans and search engines can locate data faster for proper indexing. Based on this, sitemaps detect new information about what was posted on a page, when it was posted, frequency of posting, relationship of the page with other pages, and other image or video features of the page.

How Sitemaps Work

Sitemaps work to arrange the structures of web pages in a hierarchical page-by-page manner, and also in a dynamic post content manner. The first is to help humans to view page listings in a systematic and alphabetical order so as to locate specific content faster. The second model uses a structured format known as Google’s XML Sitemap model to get both humans and search engine bots to crawl web pages more efficiently.

The main purpose of sitemaps is to allow web information to be found faster in a very organized manner. This makes it helpful to search bots to index pages faster for archival purposes. Sitemaps follow links from one page to the other on your website and from your site to other external sites. The sitemap protocols automatically arrange your website structures and features so that search engine bots can read them and serve them to human readers within minutes of new updates.

How Sitemaps Help Your SEO Needs

Since sitemaps improve the indexability and navigation of your website, they serve SEO needs. Apart from SEO benefits, sitemaps serve the following purposes –

• Improves crawling and indexing of poorly indexed sites
• Enhances bot activities for websites with numerous thousands of pages
• Helps new websites with few external links to get discovered in search engine listings
• Helps sites with rich media content such as Ajax, Silverlight and Flash to get easily indexed where search engines would have otherwise overlooked them
• Improves search engine visibility for websites with certain portions invisible to human users

A final word: Google does not guarantee to crawl or index all pages or items in your website even with a sitemap in place. But the benefits are outstanding and it pays to have sitemaps on your site.