Why You Need A Sitemap

Quite often, sitemaps are considered useless in the process of building a website, and this is true if you put one up without knowing why. By emphasizing the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to adjust your own sitemap in order to suit your own needs.

1) Navigation

Quite literally, a sitemap acts as a map of your site. If your visitors browse your site and get a bit lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always click to your sitemap to find out where they are. This will enable them to navigate through your pages with more ease.

2) Communicating your site's theme

When your visitors arrive on your sitemap, they will get a good idea of your site’s theme in no time. Therefore, there won’t be any need to get the idea of your site by reading through each page. This will help your visitor to save time.

3) Site optimization

With the creation of a sitemap, you will actually be creating a single page which will contain links to every single page on your site. So when a search engine robot hit this page, they will automatically follow the links on the sitemap and naturally every single page of your site will get indexed! It is for this purpose too that a link to the sitemap will have to be placed quite prominently on the homepage of your website.

4) Relevance Organization

Finally, a sitemap enables your visitors and yourself to get a complete bird's eye view of the structure of your site, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to consider the existing hierarchy just by looking carefully at the sitemap. As a result, you will have a site which is perfectly organized with everything sorted according to their relevance.

Bearing in mind the above points, it will be even more important to implement a sitemap for website projects with a big size. Through the use of a sitemap, you will be able to maintain your website as an easily accessible and neatly organized area for everyone.

Article Source: http://www.webdesignarticles.net.

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James Reid is contributing editor at http://www.webdesignarticles.net/. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.