Running a website today is not only a time-consuming affair, but also a complex one. You have to think about the latest strategies to beat the raging competition, churn out tons of content on a daily or weekly basis and implement a myriad of SEO strategies. Webmasters have a demanding job to do; ensuring that their content is indexed, realize higher search engines rankings, users find the required information, among others. It is for these, and many other reasons that website owners are encouraged to create sitemaps to directly notify Google about various changes the website undergoes and ensure that the new or modified content is crawled and indexed.

Unlike in the past where only new websites were submitted to the search engines, things have since changed and moved to the content. Google, for example still uses external links to find new content, but not every site has sufficient backlinks. This makes creating sitemaps a fundamental requirement that ensures that your content is found by the search engines. You can easily have this done by using either a paid-for or free sitemap creator; there are many options available today. You can signup of for a free 14 trail of the DYNO Mapper, a sitemap generator that creates a visual sitemap that you can edit, share, and submit.

Below are seven benefits of using Google sitemaps that you cannot afford to ignore.

• Content Modification: You can only maintain higher ranks in the search engines if you keep modifying content on your site; keeping it fresh and useful to the needs of your visitors. If you have used a sitemap creator or manually created a sitemap, Google will be alerted whenever your site’s content is modified.
• Efficient Crawling: Every piece of content on a site should be crawled, which sometimes may take long or never. With a sitemap, the website can be efficiently and effectively be crawled.
• Content Categorization: Sitemaps let you place web pages under categories and prioritized. This means that the pages carrying your most important content will be crawled and indexed faster than those with a less priority value.
• Get Discovered: The main reason you invest time and money creating new content for your site is that you expect to be found on the web. Use a sitemap creator to generate a sitemap and you will be discovered fast. Highly recommended for new websites or web pages and other pieces of content.
• Save Time: Some pieces of information should be delivered when still fresh, like news items. You don’t have to wait and guess when the spiders are likely to pay your website a visit. You tremendously cut on this time.
• Free service: The best things in life come in small portions and are free! Yes, submitting your sitemap to Google doesn’t cost a penny, just do it!
• Learn About Your Visitors: You can learn a lot by monitoring your sitemap reports. Errors will be displayed so that you can fix, traffic sources and even keyword searches. Using this information can help you improve your content and attract more traffic.

There are many other benefits that webmasters who have installed XML sitemaps to their sitemaps enjoy. If you are still thinking about it, consider using a sitemap generator and enjoy the party.