What Is SiteMap?

The sitemap is a very important and necessary component in each website. In short, the sitemap is an index page of your website, which offers links to all pages of your website. These links are categorized and organized in hierarchical form, which makes finding them very easy. In case the visitor of your website cannot find the needed page, he or she should refer to the sitemap. Moreover, the sitemap helps the search engines to index your website. Providing text-based links to key pages makes the sitemap a great way to be found by the search engines. Some of you probably know that Google's Webmaster Guidelines include multiple references to sites maps, which mean that site maps must be important.

I guess you have referred to the sitemap of many websites. You have found out that sitemaps help you save your time that otherwise you would waste searching for the website you have interest in. we all have spent hours searching for a certain page. Today using a sitemap, you just have to follow the link.

All web site owners, web designers, usability experts, and search marketers agree that having a sitemap is very important for the success of each website. Actually for most of them each website must include several very important pages such as a home page, an about us page, a contact us page, and a site map. So far, the first three have proven to be an irreplaceable part of each web site. However, the sitemap page is gaining more and more popularity.

When building the structure of your web site do not forget to create a link to the sitemap. As well, validate the functionality of the links you created in order to avoid following troubles. In case this sounds scary and you think that you are not able to accomplish these tasks because they are too complicated you?d better look for something to help you. There are various online programs which will do all these work for you. These programs are very simple. All you have to do is to type in the URL or the link of your website and they will create the sitemap for you.

Each website must offer a large or small sitemap for sure. The site maps make it easier for search engine spiders to discover and crawl every page of your website. That is why the bigger the sitemap is the better.

It is easier with small sites because their sitemap could contain text links to single every page just following the site's folder structure. The different topics could be categorized either in a directory-like format or as table of contents. Unfortunately, this type simple site map organization gives satisfactory results only for a site of 100 pages or less.

In case your site contains more than 100 pages it is meaningless to link to every single page in a site map. Visitor would feel lost in the great number of links and they won?t be able to find the one that they are looking for. Moreover, Google recommends maximum 100 links per page. If you are planning to create a sitemap for a 10,000-page or fewer web site, it is a good idea to add links only to core pages throughout the site.

When creating a sitemap for a larger site you will have to optimize the content up to a dozen different categories. In this case, you?d better add a brief description of each core page in order to make the sitemap user-friendly. If the link to each core page is accompanied by a short text describing the page's content which itself offers links that go deeper into the site from these core pages, both visitors and search engines can navigate the varying themes of a larger site.

When it comes to extremely large sites, which contain more than 100,000 pages the sitemap must be organized in a similar way. It has to include a classification of the core hierarchal content with links to different products, services, or other content.

Sitemaps are usually an index page, which summarizes the content of the pages within a single site. However, there is another type of sitemaps, which consists of a series of links to pages of different sites.

Sitemaps are the main way to help search engine spiders when crawling a site's content. In order to make your website visible on the Web you need to have it indexed. However, sitemaps are still not the only way to optimize your website.