What is a SiteMap? Does it Help Search Engine Optimization?
Not everyone is a website guru. Regardless whether you are a website novice, a LinkedIn blogger or a business owner who outsources his web development needs, you have most likely seen the acronym SEO. You may even know what it means. For those who don’t, SEO means search engine optimization. In short, SEO is a collection of techniques utilized to make it easy for people to find your website. One of these techniques is using a sitemap.
It’s not just about keywords
When most people think about Search en, they focus on keywords. Keywords are words you type into a search engine to find the topic you are looking for. Granted, keywords are a very powerful search engine optimization technique, but there are others which are equally as powerful. One of these is creation of a sitemap.
A sitemap is exactly as the name implies – it is a mapping of all of the links contained within your website. This map, however is not for human eyes, but rather robotic ones. Search engines utilize “spiders” or robots which “crawl” through a website and index it. Spiders look for keywords, links, meta tags and other things which tell the search engine what a website is about. The sitemap is a valuable tool because it tells the search engine exactly which pages you want searched, when they were last updated and how the pages are organized. For this reason, a sitemap is invaluable. And the beautiful part is, they are really easy to make.
Making a Sitemap
If you know how to code, you can create your own sitemap manually. This is beneficial because you can customize the sitemap to contain all of the information you want it to. If you are not technical, however, fear not – there are tools which will do the work for you. Blogging sites, for example give you access to plugins such as Yoast SEO or Google XML sitemaps which will instantaneously create a sitemap. The Google XML plugin will also map images, which the Yoast free version does not.
There are also online site mapping tools. Simply type in the url of your website and the tool does the rest. Once the online tool has finished running, you can download the map and upload it to your website. The only drawback to the online tools is that you must have access to your root directory to use them. Some services, such as WordPress do not allow such access. Once the sitemap is on your site, you can use Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to have them searched. Submitting them is optional (the engines will find them regardless) but it can speed up the indexing.
Search engine optimization is all about making your pages easy to find, and a sitemap does just that. Whether you create it manually, via a plugin or an online generator, your sitemap will allow the search engines to understand your content and index it appropriately. Do you create your own sitemaps or do you use a tool? Let us know!
Author: Donnell Peavy
