The sitemap is a crucial part of any website. It is a key file that contains all the important pages of your website. But how would you decide the level of importance of the webpages? It’s simply that, the webpages you want the search engines to learn about and consider for higher ranking, should be included in the sitemap. A sitemap helps the visitors by guiding them to their intended pages and the search engine crawlers to crawl the website. Hence, for all the websites intended to do SEO, a sitemap is a must. So if you’re looking to get your own website, opt for the best website development services in India and excel in your pursuits.
However, based on the purpose, there are two types of sitemaps. One is an XML sitemap, it is only for the crawlers. The other is HTML sitemap and it is mainly for the website visitors. But here in this blog, we’ll discuss the benefits of having a sitemap on your website.
Why Should Your Website Have a Sitemap?
Approximately 380 new websites are created every minute in the wide world of the web (Source: Siteefy). So how does Google or other search engines discover that among such a vast number of websites, you also have one? Simply with the help of search engine bots! For Google, it is called crawlers or spiders that help the website appear on the search engines. Google crawlers explore all the new links by crawling. This way your website appears on the search engines.
So, a sitemap is like an invitation to the crawlers to crawl and index the webpages listed in it. There are a lot of benefits of having a sitemap on your website, and these are:
1.Prioritize Webpages
Sitemaps, specifically the XML sitemaps, are designed for the search engine crawlers. It allows you to put tags for the crawlers to identify the most vital pages of your website. This way the crawlers will get a clear idea of the webpages that it needs to focus on first.
2.Find and Index New URLs
Most of the eCommerce websites are of large volume. New pages are continuously being added to these type of websites. So it becomes very difficult for the crawlers to find the new URLs and index them to the search engine. Here comes the best use of a sitemap. For these kinds of large websites, adding a sitemap helps the crawlers to find and index the newly added or updated URLs. The website development services of the leading digital marketing agency in Mumbai can help you with the right strategies regarding the same.
3.Understand Content Better
Listing webpages in the sitemap helps the crawlers find the content pages that are not linked well. If you have added a lot of informative content on your website, you would want the search engines to know about it. So adding such pages to the sitemap helps the crawlers to crawl, index and consider the webpages for ranking, easily. Again, a sitemap ensures that the crawlers take the rich media content or another sitemap compatible annotations as extra information in consideration for search, wherever applicable.
4.Improve SEO
If you have published a new website and started doing SEO, it’s obvious that it won’t have lots of external links. But we know that the crawler follows the links to crawl one page to another. So it’s possible that the bots might not discover your website. But having a sitemap and listing all the URLs on it improves the process of SEO. For more such insights, avail the top website design services in India.
5.Organize a Large Website
If you have a large website then you must organize it for the users as well crawlers. So for such websites the sitemaps, specifically the HTML ones work as a roadmap. Adding all the important URLs to the sitemap helps a website to organize for the users. It’s like a visual sitemap for the users that helps to provide them with a smooth experience.
Final Thoughts
Having a sitemap on your website is as important as having a website for your business. A website without a sitemap is a useless one because it won’t be crawled, indexed properly. This, in turn, will hamper the SEO process and restrict it from getting a higher rank on the top SERP. So if your website doesn’t have a sitemap, Get in Touch with us and get the most valuable insights and services with the design and development of your website.