Why Sitemaps are Necessary for Optimizing a Website?

Sitemaps are mostly an XML document but you should also use an HTML sitemap as well. XML sitemaps are made for search engine spiders so that it can easily and quickly extract every information about your website. Whereas, an HTML sitemap helps in navigating lost customers to your website. Sitemaps contain the list of pages of your website which you’ve chosen to index on Google or any other search engine. Search Engines like Google often take the help of a sitemap file to guide itself to the pages which are available on the website of yours. Information of each and every page of your website is carried by the sitemap, such as the time when the website was created or last modified, the importance of every page of your website, and more.

Indexing the pages

Sitemaps help in speeding up the entire process of indexing the pages. Google is the most famous Search Engine used practically by everyone worldwide and it prefers the usage of sitemaps when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. There are many benefits attached to using sitemaps especially when your website is a large one, or a website which contains a huge amount of content that is not properly linked, new website, or website which is rich in media content. It can be easily concluded that most of the major websites need to have a sitemap in order to function properly.

Content duplication and syndication

One of the main reasons to use the sitemap for your website is to deal with the problems of content syndication and duplication. To syndicate the content on other websites as well, many websites put up a lot of content. The problem of republishing the same content with the permission of the author is common as well. So, content duplication has become a huge problem nowadays.

Don’t let the spammers go ahead of you!

Google penalizes those websites who are engaged in content duplication, to eliminate those spammy websites from appearing on the search results page. This results in displaying only those websites which have published the original piece of content. When you have a sitemap to your website, it becomes very advantageous for you. This enables you to demonstrate Google that your website is the original creator of the content. The sitemap shows the date, time, and even the exact hour on which the content was published. This gives your website more exposure by eliminating the spammy websites who have the same content as yours and is stealing your traffic.

In a nutshell, if you create a sitemap for your website, it would be worthwhile as it is a highly important aspect of Search Engine Optimization. Recent studies have shown that websites with sitemaps tend to be more successful than websites that do not have a sitemap. So do not wait anymore and create a sitemap for your website today.