The User Experience Blog for Website Architecture Planning

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.

Bing is the second most powerful search engine after Google. In as much as most people pay close attention to everything Google, using Bing can go a long way in ensuring that your content attains more exposure, attracts more traffic and ranks better in the search engines. If you are yet to create a sitemap for Bing, now is the time so long as your CMS or site can handle it. Alternatively, you can install any of the available sitemap plugins that will take care of all the technicalities for you. In fact, you are always free to use a sitemap generator for this purpose.

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.

If you are still unconvinced on why you need to create and submit sitemaps to Google and other major search engines, you just need to realize that you are losing out on a great opportunity to maximize your site’s potential. Initially, most webmasters and website owners cited the complexity involved in creating sitemaps, but that shouldn’t be a reason anymore. Today, you can make good use of any of available assortment of sitemap makers to have your sitemap neatly generated, fast and reliably. Also, you don’t have to pay a penny submit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo, and Bing because it is free.