A sitemap serves as your online table of contents providing links to all of your pages. These links are presented in categories where they appear in hierarchal form, making them a lot easier to find. This comes in quite handy when a visitor fails to find what they are looking for when navigating your site, for whatever reason. The visitor can refer to the sitemap page where everything you present can easily be found. Extra bonus – sitemaps are search-engine friendly making it easier for you to be found. When you build a sitemap with either XML- or text-based links to your pages, the search engine bots can easily index all your website content.

Use Google’s Sitemap Guide and Format

Since Google is the most popular search engine used by millions of people worldwide, it goes without question that your SEO efforts could make your website Google friendly. When you make use of Google’s Webmaster guidelines, you will find many different references to site maps. Google employs XML-based site maps. The advantages for using a global friendly site that include the fact the search engine will find any of your website structure changes much faster that would if you did not have a sitemap. These changes are picked up and displayed almost immediately by Google. Websites that include a site map will be indexed and the links displayed much faster than ones that do not have one. Therefore, maintaining an up-to-date site map should write as a high priority in all your SEO efforts.

Check out XML-Sitemaps.com to create a sitemap for Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Updating By Hand or By Tool

Several ways exists for any SEO-savvy webmaster to both create and update site maps. This can be done through and coding the entire document or through putting to use one of the many tools available online to complete these functions. Another consideration that should be noted is that you should fall the Google friendly format for constructing site maps.

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