Today I am going to explain what a Site Map is, and how a site map benefits your site, for search engines and visitors.
What is Website Sitemap
A site map is basically a table of contents for your website, or an index. It lists all the pages of your website or the important ones, so people and Search Engine Bots can easily navigate through all the pages. To understand how a sitemap works to benefit your website, we first need to understand how Search Engines gather their content and surf websites.
When a Search Engine Bot, sometimes called spiders, visits a website, it sees a style-free website. The style is not required since the spider is only after the text, links, and the URL to the images.
A sample of what spider is this. I am showing a few styles still, so you can understand the importance of each tag on a website. The larger text, which is headers in HTML is more important than the content.
Do note that the size of the text isn't an important part, the size is only for visual understanding. Once the search engine grabs all the content of that page, it goes onto the next page.
To go to the next page, it needs a link to it. It grabs all the links from the page it was just on, puts them in a queue and the spider then visits them. The same process is done until all URLs are found and visited.
This is where a site map comes in. Instead of a bot possibly missing a URL due to limits of the spider, or a specific set of rules to only search certain pages, a site map contains all the important links you want to make sure the spider will visit.
Site Maps can be in many different formats, such as XML files, but I prefer having it in HTML and with the rest of the site.
How a Sitemap Benefits Your Site, for Search Engines and Visitors
So it benefits users as much as it benefits search engines. Now that a sitemap is being used, you could possibly gain more visitors because more content is being stored in search engines.
There will be more posts, topics, comments, and tags stored so when someone searches for a keyword, on a page that would have been skipped by the bot, they will see your website in the search results.
To create a site map, there are generators online, but they usually cost money for full access, and they are not worth it.
If you are running a WordPress site, there are plugins that are site maps. But most WordPress sites are set up fairly well that they usually don't require a site map.
- If you want a site map for a small website, that isn't dynamic or fully coded in HTML, you can usually just enter the URLs manually since you are less likely to change content, or change the URL structure.
But if you are running a dynamic website, and want a site map, you can make a custom PHP file, or another scripting language, and have it grab information from your database to create the site map. So that's what a site map is, and how it can benefit your website. Thank you for reading.
Website Sitemap Script for Blogspot.com:
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