There are many ways by which you can optimize your website for better rankings in search engine results pages. But we often overlook the easiest SEO techniques and focus on the more technical ones. One of the tricks that are often snubbed is the creation of a sitemap.
What Is a Sitemap?
In the point of view of human users, a sitemap helps people more easily navigate a website. Within it, you’ll find the entire website’s structure in simplified form broken down into its main sections and their corresponding links. Hence, human visitors will know exactly where to go to when looking for something. Otherwise, if they only get confused, they might end up transferring to your competition’s website.
In search engine crawlers’ perspective, a sitemap is a way of informing them about which portions of your website you want them to crawl on. It lists down the URLs of your website plus their corresponding meta information (i.e. last update, frequency of updates, image’s subject, video category, etc.) so that search engine bots can more intelligently and efficiently go all over it.
HTML and XML Sitemaps
Sitemaps are not a new thing. They’ve always been part and parcel of the best practices of web design. But now that major search engines have started paying more attention to sitemaps, they are now more crucial than ever to your site’s ranking in search results.
You may have heard about an HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap. To clarify, it shouldn’t be a case of one or the other. HTML and XML sitemaps are two crucial areas of SEO. You need to use both for an SEO campaign to really work.
An HTML sitemap is like your website’s table of contents. It’s created mainly to enhance user experience. It presents a summary of your site’s categories and subcategories so that users can easily find the page that they’re looking for without having to use your navigation menu. While sitemaps are also a great way of telling search engine bots what the most important areas of your site are, their primary use is for your human users.
An XML sitemap is basically a .XML file containing all of your pages’ links in it. Just one look at it and you’ll see that it’s useless for human users. But regardless of how it looks like, it needs to contain information that search engine crawlers deem important like URL location, priority, and frequency of updates. Unlike HTML sitemaps that you shouldn’t fill with all your links since it would only be an eyesore for human users, XML sitemaps should include all of your URLs. Doing so will help your pages get indexed faster and your site to rank better.
What are the Benefits of Having a Sitemap?
Sitemaps bring more benefits other than better visibility to search engine crawlers and easier navigation for human users.
- Useful planning tool when designing your website. - Even if your site is relatively young and contains only a few pages, it helps to have a structure so you can organize your pages better. This is true especially if you have plans to expand your website in the future. If you wish to add more pages later on, you’ll know where to place them if you have a sitemap. This way, your site won’t become a mishmash of pages that have not relation to one another.
- More of your web pages will be indexed. - The number of visits that search engine crawlers conduct is dependent on how often your site gets updated. So if there are changes to your website every day, those bots will most likely visit it every day. Also, the depth of indexing that Google in particular does is dependent on the number of levels your website has. Your homepage is considered a level one page. Any page that’s pointed to from the homepage is a second level page. Pages that are pointed to from a second level page are third level pages. And so on.
SEO experts believe that the way Google indexes pages depends largely on PageRank. For instance, if your homepage has a PageRank of at least one, Google will index your second level pages. But if those second level pages don’t have a good PageRank, Google won’t bother indexing your third level pages and those beyond that.
If you have a sitemap and link to it from your homepage, all the pages linked to in your sitemap won’t be any lower than the third level. This will push Google to index your entire site, especially if your homepage and sitemap page have good rankings.