Websites have become leading information sources in the world. Actually, that is one of the leading reasons why people spend hours behind their personal computers researching, laughing at jokes, sharing stories online, making purchases, reading reviews, and even playing games. This content is constantly updated on the site, but the only way search engines can learn about their existence is through natural crawling by bots, which might take weeks. This is why many people have tried to learn and understand how to create sitemaps, which is actually just a step towards the right direction, because there is more.

One of the most critical and often overlooked components of search engines optimization is the fact that sitemaps have an important role to play. If properly managed, crawl rates can be influenced by ensuring that the website has sufficient internal links, best achieved with sitemaps. Some pages may have been removed from the search engines for one reason of the other, mostly because of improper use of htaccess file that bars search engines spiders from crawling pages and indexing its content. Content can never permanently be lost online; you can regain your ranking by fixing broken links. You no longer have to worry about technical codes because you can rely on website mapping tools that create the sitemaps with ease.

We have close to one billion websites on the World Wide Web. This is a huge number, bearing in mind that each of these struggles to take up the topmost positions in the search engines. There are two major sitemap types recommended for any website; the HTML and XML sitemaps. Having the two installed on the site serves various purposes; especially ensuring that your content is discovered in time and indexed and users don’t have hard time finding information on your site especially if you are operating a content-rich website.

Creating an XML or HTML sitemap is no longer a hassle. There are many sitemap generators and plugins that you can always use. However, unless properly formatted and submitted appropriately, you risk encountering a number of errors. This article explains some of the most common errors and how to solve them for successful submission of sitemaps to Google webmaster tools. Upon successfully fixing the errors, you should resubmit the sitemap.

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.