What is a Sitemap and why is it important?
There are two basic kinds of visitors who come to websites. One is the live person like yourself, the other are sometimes called ‘bots’ or ‘crawlers.’ The second category are basically just software programs running which visit your site and read the content. The most important of these to your business would be search engines like Google. When we start talk about Google visiting your site, we are talking about search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a huge buzz word in the business world right now. Sitemaps are important to visiting bots and to search engines like Google.
What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is pretty much what is sounds like, it is a map of your site. It lists all of the pages in your site in an easy-to-see format.
Why is a sitemap important?
A site map makes sure ALL of your pages can be found by a visitor. This is important where sometimes pages are disconnected from the main navigation of the site. Examples of pages like this are marketing or special promotion landing pages, old archive pages (not easily found in the standard navigation of a site), or even media type content based on Flash or Ajax (with poor linking ability).
Are there different kinds of sitemaps?
A Sitemap is a representation of the architecture of a website. There are two basic types of site maps. The first is used to assist visitors to a site to navigate the site and the second is done in XML. XML Sitemaps are used by Goggle to gather information about the site.
Should you add a sitemap to your website?
The short answer is yes. The long answer is it depends–it depends on how well your site navigation is organzied and the benefits gained for the dollars spent to add a sitemap. Your site will may see big gains from a site map if it media based (like Flash), has a large set of archived content or pages that are not linked well into your navigation. If you have solid navigation in your site linking to al your pages, then the benefits of a sitemap maybe very marginal.