What Are Sitemaps And Why We Need Them?

Having a good sitemap of your blog will help you a lot in your blog SEO. A Good sitemap is a proper roadmap of all the important pages available on your blog. i.e It’ll help google in finding out the pages of your blog sequentially. It will guide google so as to index your web pages in the google search results.

You must have seen the word Sitemap in most of the blog posts but wonder What Are Sitemaps ? Today, In this article I’ll share everything about Sitemaps that you need to know.

What Are Sitemaps ?

Being a blogger, Everyone wants to get ranked and indexed higher is the search engine index. So here Sitemap will help you a lot to get more exposure in the eyes of search engines.

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complements robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol. – Wikipedia

In simple words, Sitemaps help search engines to find out all the available pages on your blog. This way it would be easier to rank all your blog pages.

Example: Let’s consider that you have a new blog with more than 200 blog posts and 300 custom pages. You have completed the content part with your full effort.

Not every page will be internally linked to each other. Is It?

So how you can suppose google can index every page?

Google can only index those pages which are crawled by the google spiders.

So for telling the search engines about your whole blog, Sitemaps are used.

An XML sitemap contains all important pages of a blog to help Search Engine determine the structure of it:

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Benefits Of Having A Sitemap

• Content Modification: Search engines rank higher the updated content so regular modification and updation of content is requirred. Having a good sitemap will help you to ping google about the updates in your blogs So Google will be alerted whenever your site is updated.

• Efficient Crawling: Every piece of content on a site should be crawled, which sometimes may take long or never. With a sitemap, the website can be efficiently and effectively be crawled.

• Content Categorization: Sitemaps let you place web pages under categories and prioritized. This means that the pages carrying your most important content will be crawled and indexed faster than those with a less priority value.

• Get Discovered: The main reason you invest time and money creating new content for your site is that you expect to be found on the web. Use a sitemap creator to generate a sitemap and you will be discovered fast. Highly recommended for new websites or web pages and other pieces of content.

• Save Time: Some pieces of information should be delivered when still fresh, like news items. You don’t have to wait and guess when the spiders are likely to pay your website a visit. You tremendously cut on this time.

• Free service: The best things in life come in small portions and are free! Yes, submitting your sitemap to Google doesn’t cost a penny, just do it!

• Learn About Your Visitors: You can learn a lot by monitoring your sitemap reports. Errors will be displayed so that you can fix, traffic sources and even keyword searches. Using this information can help you improve your content and attract more traffic.