The Importance of a Sitemaps
Sitemaps are often considered redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the fact if you made a sitemap for the sake of having one.
By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.
What Are Sitemaps?
A sitemap is a list of pages that are contained in a website that is accessible to website crawlers or users.
It can vary in type—sometimes it may be a simple document used as a planning tool for designing the website, or it may be a web page that contains a list of all pages within a website, which is generally organized in a hierarchical way.
Sitemaps display the relationship between various pages and content of a website, demonstrating the way that the website is organized, how it can be navigated, and how it is labeled.
There are a few different types of sitemaps, and a few different styles of sitemaps. Both of these factors will vary simply based on who or what the sitemap is intended for.
Sitemaps may be addressed to users or to software.
Many sites have user-visible sitemaps which present a systematic view, typically hierarchical, of the site.
These are intended to help visitors find specific pages, and can also be used by crawlers.
Alphabetically organized site maps, sometimes called site indexes, are a different approach.
Sitemaps and their Purpose
1) Navigation purposes
A site map literally acts as a map of your site.
If your visitors browses your site and gets lost between the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your site map to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.
2) Conveying your site’s theme
When your visitors load up your site map, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time.
There is no need to get the “big picture” of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.
3) Site optimization purposes
When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your site.
Imagine what happens when search engine robots hit this page — they will follow the links on the sitemaps and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by search engines!
It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed prominently on the front page of your website.
4) Organization and relevance
A site map enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemaps.
As a result, you will have a perfectly organized site with everything sorted according to their relevance.
Summary
From the above reasons, it is most important to implement a site map for website projects with a considerable size. Through this way, you will be able to keep your website easily accessible and neatly organized for everyone to navigate with ease.
Looking for a website development?
Contact us for an affordable bespoke website development
Azacus Cloud is transforming the digital journey in a way most agencies cannot—bridging the gaps from strategy to execution. Now businesses can come to a single source to design, build and run integrated, technology driven marketing campaigns that prepare them for the future.