Creating a sitemap of any kind is no longer an option that some webmasters can choose to ignore, but a necessity that no website owner can afford to miss. They serve a myriad of purposes and lots of benefits to the site, ranging from ensuring that the site’s content is crawled and indexed by the search engines to guaranteeing better site navigation by users. Creating a sitemap is hassle-free because you can now use a sitemap generator, with some requiring one to just copy and paste the site’s URL. There is one very important benefit for creating, submitting and updating sitemaps; its significance in project planning.

Projects related to websites can be demanding, requiring lots of technical competence and professional knowledge to get it done right from the beginning. Activities such as migrating the site to a different platform, website redesign and content management are time-consuming and costly. You therefore have to get everything right from the beginning because there is no room for mistakes. These projects demands for comprehensive understanding of the website, ensuring that whatever items you deem important will either be improved on or migrated in their original form, while the poor quality items can be deleted.

Understand the Website Structure

Different websites are designed uniquely with varied structures. Understanding a site’s structure is very important, especially during website redesign. Unless the current structure has failed in enabling the business to realize its core objective, you might want to retain it in the new project. When you create a sitemap, you get to understand the site’s structure irrespective of the number of pages the site has and size. With this in mind, it will be much easy to identify any areas that might be left out during the site’s design.

Significance of Metadata

When you create a sitemap using a sitemap generator, you access lots of information on the tool’s dashboard and webmaster tools that you can use to help improve your website. Metadata such as page descriptions, titles and keywords are very important in not only SEO but also guiding users in finding the right information on the site when they visit. Search engines present SERPs based on the keywords used during the queries by the users. This means that understanding these keywords will go a long way in ensuring that your new site design is packed with the most appropriate keywords for better performance in the search engines. There are currently more than a billion websites in the world, all competing for the search engines’ attention. The more effective you optimize your content for the search engines, the better your rank. Target your content for the right audiences, get higher traffic and increase your conversion rate.

Fix Errors

Website redesigns can involve a lot of programming codes that have to be done right. Search engines, especially Google present a lot of information to help webmasters improve on their sites. There are some common errors such as 401 and 301 redirects that will point you to broken links on the site. Common errors such as broken links may have a massive influence on your overall search engines rankings because they disrupt the Googlebots’ crawling process. If they are not fixed in time, the search engines may just assume that the site is neglected and therefore will not crawl it anymore. In fact, you risk having it delisted from the search engines. It is therefore paramount that you ensure that your site’s links are complete and lead to their targeted links.

Understand the Competition

The only constant thing in business is competition. Your website project planning is destined for failure without proper competitive analysis. You have to understand the market to improve on your products and services. Now, when you use a sitemap generator, there is no restriction from creating one for the competitors. In as much as you will not submit this to the Google Webmaster tools, it will enable you to understand the site’s size, major sources of traffic, best keywords, website structure, among others. Armed with all this information, you can then invest in improving your own site, borrowing what your competitors have that you have yet to consider and ensuring that you present your site the best way possible to the customers and prospects.

Website’s Performance

How is your site likely to perform upon project completion? Where are you likely to draw the most traffic from? When is the last time you updated some pages and how frequent is that done? Can you improve on that or are you okay with the status quo? These are some of the questions that you are likely to find very straight answers when you create a sitemap. You sure will find lots of relevant information that will go a long way in ensuring that you boost your site’s performance when completed. DYNO Mapper sitemaps can show sources of traffic, keywords used to direct website users to the site, how often the site is updated and more. You can share this information with other departments or individuals to ensure that your project is completed on schedule and to your expectations.

Content Inventory

Website users are mostly interested in the information shared online, be it about a product, service, a joke or a wild rumor doing the rounds. Sitemap generators like DYNO Mapper are packed with additional features such as content inventory that you can use to understand the site’s content. You can then use the information to improve on the site’s content to attract more traffic and higher returns on your investment.

The Bottomline

HTML and XML sitemaps are very important for a website’s sustainability and overall success. Ensuring that a site’s pages are properly crawled and indexed is just one of the reasons why you should create a sitemap, but there are many other benefits. Website related projects can be demanding, but you can ease the pressure if you have a better understanding of your website. What is the easiest way to create a sitemap? Use a sitemap generator like DYNO Mapper and simplify your work today. 

The use of a sitemap generator and other content management tools is not reserved for specific individuals or businesses. Generally, everyone involved in content creation, website management, internet marketing is concerned about the performance of the site, especially in meeting business objectives. A sitemap generator enables one to create useful sitemaps fast; saving time and resources. However, the following are the most common users of a website mapping tool such as DYNO Mapper.

Content Managers

Creation of content is a tedious process, and costly. It is therefore only reasonable that you ensure that all pages of a website are well indexed by the search engines and users can find the information with ease. This is possible with the help of XML and HTML sitemaps that can be created using a sitemap generator. Search engines’ bots take time to naturally crawl websites and therefore invaluable and urgent information may not be delivered as expected if the content is not indexed in time. It is the duty of content managers to see to it that stakeholders get the required information on schedule for business. Using a sitemap generator, web content managers can ensure that the indexed process is accelerated to meet this very important objective. Other than content managers, content creators, writers, individuals tasked with content updating may also find sitemap generators useful.

Marketers and SEO Experts

Exposure is the pillar of success in business; the more exposed products and/or services are, the higher the conversion rates and profits. Therefore, it is crucial that online marketers and search engines optimization experts use sitemap generators to boost the website’s ranking in SERPs and expose the products and services more to the customers and potential clients. Sitemaps play a very important role in SEO by guiding the search engines to all the pages on the site. Page ranks are assigned based on the number and quality of incoming and outbound links, uniqueness of content and the size as well. By seeing to it that as many web pages as possible are indexed, then the SEO benefit is reaped. Furthermore, the URL descriptions in sitemaps are usually keyword-rich, making it perfect for search engines optimization. Therefore, SEO experts and online marketers benefit a lot from sitemap creators.

Webmasters

Webmasters understand the technicalities of running websites. They interact with the site on a daily basis and therefore should offer guidance to the rest of the team on what is best for the business. In fact, they take the lead when creating sitemaps because they definitely have advanced coding knowledge and can ensure that the sitemaps are error-free and submitted as expected. Even though the other personnel are free to create sitemaps, they should do so in close consultation with the webmasters. To save them time to manually create sitemaps, webmasters are encouraged to use sitemap generators and if possible customize a few areas to meet various expectations. It must however be pointed out sitemap creation, just like other content management activities is a multi-disciplinary affair that should bring on board everyone involved in the content lifecycle.

Bloggers

Creation and use of sitemaps is not just meant for commercial purposes. Whether you blog for fun or money, you sure will find sitemaps irresistible. First, blogging is time-bound. Some blog items have to be published fast and fresh. This is only possible if the information is indexed equally fast or else the competition can scoop the stories and take credit for the same. Some blogs have so many pages because they have been published over a long period of time. To ensure that some content, including the archived files are still accessible by the search engines, you should use a sitemaps generator.

User Experience Designers

Website design is diverse. The focus of any designer is to come up with a unique website that will meet users’ expectations. This is however never guaranteed because of the dynamic nature of the web and ever changing user requirements. However, a majority of web surfers are information seekers. Therefore, ensuring that they get access to this information with ease is very important. User experience designers are mandated to realize this by providing a sitemap’s page on the homepage and carefully listing all the URLs on the site. Furthermore, the designer has to categorize the information for easy access by the users. Using a sitemaps generator will serve this purpose to perfection.

Competitors

Though not very common, you might want to snoop around your competitors’ website just to understand the nature and size of their content. In as much as you cannot qualify this as a sitemap since it will not be submitted, the sitemap generator will still give you the details about the website. You can then understand your competitors’ page descriptions, number of pages, keywords and such factors that can come in handy when improving your site’s content and overall user experience.

In as much as different people may want to use sitemap generators for varied reasons, the most important factor to bear in mind is that everything is being done to improve the experience of the customer on the site. It is good for business and SEO because if a user finds your site useful, they sure will want to come back for more. In fact, they may even recommend a few friends and relatives to the website and the significance of referrals doesn’t require any emphasis.

There are quite a number of sitemap creation tools but not all are effective. Before you even consider creating a sitemap, it is important to find the best tool for guaranteeing the best experience. You need a tool that will allow you do much more than just create sitemaps. You obviously would love a system that will bring forth very reliable results with very minimal errors. At the moment, DYNO Mapper is the best because it has more features than most tools in the market. Creating sitemaps is now easy, fast and cost-effective because the tool gets the job done as you relax and worry about other aspects of your business. Try it today.

A sitemap is a guide in a website that contains links to all the other pages in the website.  It helps search engine crawlers and internet users to find the information and content they are looking for.  Typically, a sitemap is organized in a hierarchical fashion with the most authoritative pages being listed higher up in the document. The URLs and links to different pages on a website are contained in sitemap files. These links are placed together so that web crawlers can easily find them and redirect users to the content and information they are looking for. Since, Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing use the same sitemap protocol, having a sitemap in your website greatly enhances the online visibility of your website. It is therefore that you create a sitemap, which can be done with the aid of a website mapping tool like DYNO Mapper.

Typically, every website must have at least two different types of sitemaps, XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps. The XML sitemap is essential for proper indexing, crawling of pages on your website by search engines while HTML is designed for web users and placed on the home page of the site. A single XML sitemap is recommended for basic and small websites with about hundred pages. Creating both sitemaps is effortless, especially when using a sitemap generator. There are however many other compatible formats you can have, but at the moment, the two are highly recommended. Irrespective of the type of format, you may have to create more than one sitemap for a single website, depending on the site’s size.

Multiple Sitemaps

The main reason that necessitates the need to have multiple sitemaps is the size of the site. Sitemaps come with size limitations in that one sitemap cannot hold more than 50,000 URLS and should not be more than 10MB in size. As such, when you have a site that has over 50,000 URLs, then you need to have multiple sitemaps that can accommodate these links.  Size limitations are very vital in ensuring that web servers are not overloaded by large files served to search engines.

If you use multiple sitemaps in your website, it is important that you create a Sitemap Index File. This file acts like a sitemap for all the sitemaps you have in your site. The file lists all the sitemaps in the site in one collective folder for easy crawling by search engines. Multiple sitemaps should only be used when your site requirements exceed the size limitations provided for a single sitemap file.  For simple additions and updates in the website, you need not create an additional sitemap as search engines are able to pick up these updates when crawling your site.

Updating a sitemap is not the same as creating multiple sitemaps. Obviously, if there is a significant update on your sitemap you should consider having the sitemap re-crawled so that you can keep your site within the relevant search results according to different search queries.

Why You Need Multiple Sitemaps

The main reason why you should consider adding more than one sitemaps is not only to minimize crowding of links, but also to ensure that all pages are crawled and indexed by the search engines. Multiple sitemaps are very efficient in classifying and categorizing the content in a website. This may not necessarily increase your website’s PageRank but enhances better online visibility. Also, having multiple sitemaps helps achieve better search engine optimization. For instance, if your site is a content directory website with several authors, creating multiple sitemaps each for every author allows their articles to be easily found when by the search engine bots.

Creating a Sitemap Index

If you have created multiple sitemaps for your site, then you should consider creating a sitemap index, which is a file that simply lists all the sitemaps in the website. It is important to note that this index can only be used in specifying sitemaps in the same domain. The steps that need to be followed when creating this index are similar to those followed when creating a sitemap. The only difference is that the <loc> and </loc> tags should contain values on the location of the sitemaps as opposed to location of pages in the site.

The concept of creating multiple sitemaps is not only suitable for large sites as it can also be used by small sites that are growing at a fast pace. The structure that you will use when creating several sitemaps for your websites is determined by the depth of your web pages in terms of the content in each of the sections in the sites.

Errors To Avoid When Creating Multiple Sitemaps

When creating multiple sitemaps or any sitemap in your site, it is important to ensure that there are no white spaces preceding the tags. This leads to broken links and search engines may not be able to crawl your website correctly if links are not complete and may have a negative effect on your SEO. You also need to ensure that plugins are well coded to prevent conflicts between the site plugins and search engines thus resulting to a 404 error (site not found) when users are redirected to your website. In addition to this, you also need to ensure that you save the settings of your site’s permalinks properly so that the plugins in the site can allow the creation of multiple sitemaps.

How Many Sitemaps Are Required

The major determinant of the number of sitemaps needed by a website is the content and site’s size. For a small website, there is no need for a compulsory HTML sitemap since visitors can easily find needed information without any stress as the web pages are physically visible. An XML sitemap is however recommended for such websites especially those with blogs that have quality and frequently updated contents for search engine ranking.

Websites with Multilingual Content

Multiple sitemaps are advisable for websites that have multilingual content. With a reliable XML website mapping tool like DYNO Mapper, your website will have different sitemaps to manage all the languages and their peculiarities. The XML sitemap file can localize online users’ searches to the various language requirements of your visitors by targeting and matching them with their respective language.

Dividing your XML sitemap file into units and segments makes it easier for future changes. It must be well nested for easy discovery of modified or deleted pages. The organization of the content is the major reason for having sitemap on your website. Use a website mapping tool to create, submit and update multiple sitemaps. 

Not many websites have sitemaps installed for various reasons, but in most cases it is due to a lack of technical know-how but you can just use a sitemap creator. Creating a sitemap is a skill that requires proper understanding of how search engines crawl and index content online. As you create a sitemap whether manually or with the aid of a sitemap tool, it is paramount that you optimize it to deliver the required objective. There are several ways this can be realized, simply by customizing the process in the editor of the sitemap generator you are using. They include, but not limited to:

1. Prioritization of web pages
2. Content categorization
3. Restrict the number or URLs per sitemap
4. Proper keyword-rich descriptions
5. Having the sitemap page on the homepage.

Page Prioritization

The Google sitemaps protocol provides for users to rank web pages on a scale of 0.1 to 1.0. Web pages with higher ranks are crawled more often by the bots than those with a lower rank. Bearing this in mind, encourage the search engines to frequently visit pages that are dynamic in nature, based on the frequency in which they are updated. A default average of 0.5 is assigned for all the pages, but search engines discourage users from assigning high ranks for all the pages. Pages such as contact us are rarely updated and therefore there is no need for frequent crawling. On the other hand, blogs and news-related pages should be assigned higher priorities because they are often updated. Doing this using a sitemap creator is pretty easy.

Place the Sitemap on the Homepage & Root Directory

HTML sitemaps are primarily designed for web surfers, but search engines also find them invaluable. The placement of a sitemap is very important because it simplifies access to information. Naturally, most web users start navigating a website from the homepage, proceeding to categories and sub categories. Having the sitemap installed on a site’s homepage will therefore ensure that users can find the required information by browsing through the listed URLs and clicking on the right one without a hassle as opposed to clicking one section to another. On the other hand, the search engines also start crawling from the homepage (in most cases) and proceeding to other pages. If new links have been added, then it will be easier and faster to be found. It is therefore important that you ensure that the sitemap page is strategically placed for easy identification by the users. For XML sitemaps, install them on the site’s root directory.

Content Categorization

Most web structures have the homepage, then categories and sub-categories, in that order. Each section covers a specific area of business, which simplifies access to information. The same should apply when you create a sitemap; have the links categorized based on the commonality of the content. If it is an ecommerce website, for example, you may have categories such as fashion, electronics, among others then sub categories covering specific areas of the above. Proper categorization is also good for SEO because you end up with lots of keyword-rich content clumped together, which will influence the final ranking of the site on the SERPs.

Limit the Number of URLs For Each Sitemap

The number of URLs to include on every sitemap depends on the size of the website. Some really comprehensive sitemap generators like DYNO Mapper enable users to restrict the number of links on every sitemap, say a maximum of 50,000 or thereabout. If you have more pages, you can choose to create multiple sitemaps to meet varied needs and expectations. If your categories have sufficient content to fill up a sitemap, you can generate a sitemap for each of these sections. Alternatively, you can choose to only include specific pages that you deem important in your sitemap for the best experience. Limiting the number of URLs is important because overcrowding links will not only confuse users but may be mistaken by search engines for a link farm.

Keyword-Rich Link Descriptions and Titles

See to it that every link is accompanied by a keyword-rich description about the content. It doesn’t have to be a narrative, but a brief about what information users can get by clicking on these links. You will not only save the users’ time who will go direct to the relevant information, but also create a sitemap page rich in targeted keywords. This is very important for the search engines ranking and some websites have sitemap pages that rank higher than any other page. This is one of the most important ways to optimize your sitemap because you appeal to the search engines more and you stand to attract more traffic to the site. The same should apply to the titles, ensuring that you incorporate at least one major keyword in it.

Identify and Fix Error Messages

Users feel annoyed whenever they click on a dead link. This means that they cannot access the information on the link, which can really be frustrating. When you create a sitemap, it is paramount that you pay close attention to the links because they form the basis on which sitemaps operate. There are instances when some links may end up with the wrong description. To optimize your sitemap, endeavor to ensure that all links lead to their relevant content so that users and search engines are not misled.

Keep Your Sitemap Updated

It is now easier to automatically update the sitemap; thanks to DYNO Mapper website mapping tool. Whenever new content is created and uploaded to the website, the tool will automatically update the sitemap when you click refresh. In as much as this can be automated, there is no harm in manually reviewing and ensuring that everything is in order.

Creating a sitemap requires proper understanding of all major search engines and how they crawl and index sites and how users interact with the content on a website. To get the best from your sitemap, consider the above factors and get the best from your effort. Don’t forget that to create a sitemap is a multi-disciplinary affair requiring the inputs of a team involved in various aspects of website design, redesign and content management.