The importance of using sitemaps for effective search engine optimisation
Sitemaps are an extremely useful but somewhat over looked tool that can help in the search engine optimisation of a website. It’s therefore important that a website owner understands what sitemaps are, what they do and how to make the most of them.
What is a sitemap?
In basic terms, a sitemap is a page which displays a list of links to the different pages or sections of a website. There are two types of sitemaps, an html sitemap and an XML sitemap.
HTML sitemaps
The inclusion of an html sitemap on a website is always a handy feature to have as it allows visitors to quickly locate the contents they are looking for without having to browse the website, page by page, section by section. They’re particularly useful for large, complex websites where dynamic content or other features such as javascript or ajax would otherwise hinder a search engine from effectively crawling the website links.
As html sitemaps offer a secondary method for search engines to crawl pages it also gives website owners the opportunity to deep link directly to product level pages that may otherwise be buried deep within the websites hierarchy.
XML Sitemaps
XML Sitemaps are similar to html sitemaps, in that they too provide a list of url’s but which have been encoded in a special XML format. This sitemap then sits in the root directory of your website and provides participating search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask with information about the website.
What are the benefits of using a sitemap?
I find sitemaps particularly useful for large complex websites where the url’s are dynamically generated. By offering search engines a list of the absolute url’s that they need to directly access the most important pages of your website you will quickly open up your website so that these pages can get crawled and indexed as soon as quickly as possible.
If however you have a new website that doesn’t have many inbound links yet then it may be difficult for the search engines to naturally start finding you. By registering an XML sitemap with Google and the other participating engines you will help to fast track the initial indexing process by notifying the search engines of your websites presence and give important information about your website.
This ability to provide information to the search engines gives XML sitemaps the edge over html sitemaps. They allow you to tell a search engine how often the pages on your website change. Is it daily, weekly or monthly? You can inform the search engine spiders when the page was last updated and the importance of that page by giving it a value. For example your home page could be given a rating of 1.0 while service or product pages could have a value of 0.8 and blog posts a value of 0.5.
How do I format an XML sitemap?
HTML sitemaps are simply a list of links written in html using syntax which looks like;
<a href=”pagename.html”>Link Text</a>
XML sitemaps on the other hand are a little more complex and have to validate in order to successfully provide the information you require to the search engines. XML sitemap syntax looks like this;
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
If you aren’t an expert coder then fear not as there are many free online sitemap generators out there that will do the job for you.
While to most people sitemaps can seem an insignificant page on a website, in search engine optimisation terms they can be very important. In my experience I have seen websites experience massive increases in performance from the simple addition and clever use of a HTML and XML sitemap so don’t under estimate their value.
The real value of a registered XML sitemap becomes more evident when you make use of Google’s Webmaster Tools Control Panel but more about that in another post.
For more information about XML sitemaps and the latest protocols have a look at www.sitemaps.org
