Recently, a client of ours received an unsolicited email message from a search engine optimization company that was looking to drum up some business. The generic email informed our client that their website was missing a "Google Sitemap file", and that it was in their best interests to get one.
Now, the company was right about one thing; the website did not have a sitemap. But it was wrong in advising our client get one.
So, what is a sitemap? And how do you know if your website needs one?
What is a Sitemap?
In the simplest terms, a sitemap is a list of the pages in a website. And submitting this list of pages to Google or Yahoo enables you to ensure that these search engines know about all of your website's pages.
Benefits of Creating a Sitemap for Your Website
Sitemaps are often a great way to improve search engine visibility because it enables all pages to be found. With many websites, for example, the navigation is in flash or some other technology, such as AJAX, which makes it difficult or impossible to be crawled via search engines. Sitemaps correct this problem. Additionally, sitemaps are particularly useful for large websites, frequently updated websites, and websites full of archival content, whose pages are hard to reach via links.
But that's not all. An added benefit of creating a sitemap is the ability to provide additional information about the pages in your website such as:
- the date a page was last modified.
- how often pages change (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly)
- the relative importance of your pages using a parameter called priority.
But not all websites need to have sitemaps.
You Do Not Need A Sitemap If'
- your website is small.
- you don't update your website.
- all pages are easily reachable via links.
If you are still unsure as to whether you should create a sitemap for your website, visit Google to check how well your website has already been indexed. To do this, enter
site:www.example.comin the search field. (Be sure to edit the sample search query to reflect the domain name for your website.) And if you find that Google is indeed missing a significant portion of your website's pages, it is probably a good idea to build a sitemap.
