The User Experience Blog for Website Architecture Planning

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.

Technology is making life easier, better and enjoyable. Owning a website is nolonger a reserve of the few with technological know-how. In fact, anyone who can use a MS word can now own and even manage a website without any support from the tech-savvy fellows. This is the good news, but here is the bad. Because everyone can create and own a site, there are currently far too many websites in the world; in fact, a billion to be precise as at October 2014. Most of these websites are very active, and fall under common niches. Large numbers are synonymous with competition, and in this case, all sites are competing for search engines’ attention. If you have the content online, it has to be found by the search engines so that it can be availed to web users.

Some webmasters have raised questions over the effectiveness of HTML sitemaps. Many people put more emphasis on XML Sitemaps and in the process they forget about the HTML sitemaps which are also effective for navigation and search engines’ crawling. These sitemaps serve a dual purpose as they are meant both for the visitors as well as the search engine robots. Just like XML sitemaps there are many sitemap generators that can be used to create HTML sitemaps. Whenever a new website goes live, one has to submit their websites to the Search engines so that they know about the online presence of the website. In return, the search engines deploy their robots or crawlers on your website which help in the indexing process. These bots crawl through link by link and report it back to the search engine.

Having a sitemap on your website is no longer a question of ‘if’ or ‘why’, but rather about ‘when.’ That is, there are many benefits that website owners get from this simple act that can even be automated with the help of a sitemap generator. It is not only good for your SEO, but also highly recommended for a better user experience in the long run. If you have just created a new website or included fresh pages, it is paramount that you ensure the pages are easily discoverable. You can make this happen by creating a sitemap, submitting it to the search engines of your choice (start with Google) and then updating it.

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.