Your website sitemap is what makes it easy for your human visitors to gain access to whatever information has brought them to your website. The search engine spiders also use the sitemap to gain the information they look for from the deeper pages within your website. So without a sitemap your visitors and the spiders are lost without a GPS in a strange town with many unknown alleys.

Spider bait

The search engines are mighty super computers that use what is called spiders or bots to crawl or sift through the millions of websites, billions of web pages that make up the Internet. Few people think about the work that must happen before they can type in a search phrase on their browser search bar and get an answer within seconds.

The spiders continuously look for fresh information that is the most relevant to the keywords that people use to search with. The companies that own the search engines are very competitive so they compete to show they can bring internet users the most relevant results for their searches. The search engines hang their reputation on being the best at doing this. Thus, the search engines evolve and bring innovative capabilities into how they look for fresh and relevant content. This is all very important to keep up to date with as it affects your website’s ranking in the SERPs.

Sitemaps have many uses

Online tools make it easy to create a sitemap that can be uploaded to the website’s root directory. Some tools give the option to stop the spiders from crawling redundant or irrelevant pages. This is a great help for getting the spiders to index targeted pages. A vital requirement is to submit your website. This allows the search engines to have a fully developed map of your website.

Sitemaps are used to categorize your different web pages into tabs that are subject specific. You use your sitemap to add extra content to that which is already presented and your sitemap provide an indication of the information that will be found on those pages. These marginal notes on your sitemap is what allows visitors to make quick decisions about what category of information they are looking for and then proceed from that point.

Spider friendly sitemaps

Sitemaps are navigational tools of great importance and should be kept as simple as possible. Don’t get creative with your sitemap; simple, self-explanatory that gives a clear and brief plan of the website layout is exactly what you need. Make you sitemap user-friendly by using text links that include keywords and phrases that give the general idea of the contents.

Remember that your navigational tool on the website and your sitemap should never be substituted for each other; they should instead compliment each other. Your sitemap is an important part of your SEO efforts. It is hugely popular with both your site visitors and the search engine spiders. Neglecting to have a logical and user-friendly sitemap can have a negative effect on your search engine ranking in the SERPs.

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