Google Sitemaps Tutorial – What Is A Sitemap?

If you do not have a sitemap for your website, it is probably a good idea if you create one. In this article, we’ll walk you through the basics of what a sitemap is. And next time, we’ll tell you how to create one.

What is a Sitemap?

Definition: A sitemap is a comprehensive list of the pages in a website.

If your website is well organized and all pages are easily reached via navigational links, you might be wondering why, or if, a sitemap is necessary. But as you’ll see below, there are two kinds of sitemaps: one for visitors and one for search engines.

Sitemaps Enable Visitors To Quickly Find Information

Many large websites contain tens or hundreds of pages. This means that access to many of these pages is not direct. In other words, a users will have might have to navigate through multiple pages to get to the one page that they are looking for. As a result, large websites can benefit greatly from sitemaps.

A sitemap will enable users to see a list of all pages and quickly get to where they want to go.

Sitemaps Enable Search Engines to Find All Pages In A Website

Similarly, search engines may not be able to easily access or find all pages in a website. In addition to the problem mentioned above for large websites, search engines may also be unable to crawl links for other reasons such as if links are in flash documents or are generated via AJAX. Additionally, dynamically generated pages which require user input will also not be accessed.

By submitting a sitemap to search engines, all desired pages will be able to be crawled. Additionally, sitemaps can include information such as when and how often a page is updated, as well as a page’s relative importance when compared to other pages in the website.

Will Sitemaps Improve Search Engine Ranking?

No, sitemaps have not been directly tied to increases in search engine ranking. However, sitemaps will improve search engine visibility. This means that more of your pages will be in search engines. Thus, sitemaps will have a direct impact on the level of traffic received from search engines.

In our next article, we will teach you how to create a sitemap for submission to Google.