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.

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.