The User Experience Blog for Website Architecture Planning

There are three main varieties of ways to create sitemaps. The choice will depend on a number of factors, ranging from the nature of your website, content quantity, intended outcome, among others. Note that you can easily create sitemap using a sitemap generator.

• Indexed Sitemap: This is a directory or an alphabetical listing of your site’s pages.
• Complete Categorical Sitemap: This is the most popular comprehensive sitemap with classified links into categories. It is much easier to search for information and you can easily move between categories.
• Restricted Categorical: Here, all links in a specific category are displayed at a go. However, all links of a website are not shown as is the case with categorical sitemap and therefore limits the lists links in some categories which simplifies viewing and doesn’t strain the eyes.

With the dynamic nature of the web, having a sitemap for your website is a necessity that can only be ignored by people courting their own peril. However, some webmasters get lost whenever they decide to create sitemap for their sites and realize there are two types; HTML and XML sitemaps. Well, though the roles of both sitemaps are closely related, their targets differ; while HTML sitemaps target users, XML sitemaps on the other hand are meant for the search engines.

The number of websites in the world has surpassed 1 billion. This translates to 1 website for every seven people. This has resulted in competition for rankings in SERPs because every website owner wants to be found. Your site’s visibility first depends on the content, which then has to be crawled. This is a bit tricky if you have so many pages full of information, which makes it difficult for Googlebot spider to detect what should be indexed on your site. It is for this reason that Google sitemaps were introduced, which are basically text files with lists of web addresses of all the pages contained on your website.

Approximately half of the world’s one billion websites don’t have sitemaps. If you are among the 50% yet to create a sitemap, then know that you are losing out on an important SEO strategy that can see you sail through the search engines rankings with no difficulty. Thousands of websites are launched every day and millions of web pages created. When they crawl sites, search engine spiders land anywhere on the site, and then move from one page to another with the aid of HTML codes.

To get the most from your XML sitemaps, you must understand several strategies that should be factored as you create a sitemap. Every website owner wants his or her website to make it to the first page in the SERPs, but that is not possible. Only a few out of over a billion websites in the world make it, and it is through implementing crucial SEO techniques over a long period of time. Note that search engines such as Google are constantly changing their algorithms aimed at ensuring that only the best websites are ranked higher, it is no longer easy to trick search engines into false website ranking.