What is a Sitemap?
A sitemap is like a website map, it gives you an overall view of a website. It shows the complete structure of a website, listing every page of a website.
A sitemap helps visitors and search engines to find pages on a website.
Here is an example of a Sitemap:
The Importance of Sitemaps
A sitemap is often neglected in the process of building a website. Here are 4 reasons why a sitemap is important for your website.
1. Navigation purposes
A sitemap literally acts as a map of your website. If your visitor browses your website and gets lost between the pages on your website, they can always refer to your sitemap to see where they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.
2. Conveying your website's theme
Through visiting your sitemap, your visitors can easily and quickly get the gist of your website.
When your visitors load up your sitemap, they will get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to get the "big picture" of your site by reading through each page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors' time.
3. Site optimization purposes
When you create a sitemap, you are actually creating a single page which contains links to every single page on your website. When the search engines hit this page, the search engines will follow the links on your sitemap and naturally every single page of your website gets indexed by the search engines.
4. Organization and relevance
A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your website structure, and whenever you need to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at your sitemap. As a result, you will have a perfectly organized website with everything sorted according to their relevance. You will be able to keep your website neatly organized and easily accessible for everyone.
