What Are Sitemaps, And Why Are They Useful?

One simple but effective tool often overlooked by many marketers is their website’s sitemap. A well-structured sitemap not only enhances your site’s SEO performance but also improves the user experience by making your content more accessible. In this post, we’re taking a look at why sitemaps are essential for any website, and how they can help achieve greater visibility for your website in SERPs.

Put simply, a sitemap is important because it helps search engines like Google efficiently crawl and index a website, ensuring that all pages are discovered and ranked. This improves your website’s visibility in search results, leading to better SEO performance and easier navigation for users. Let’s take a deeper look.

What Is A Sitemap?

At its core, a sitemap is a file that provides information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, as well as the relationships between them. Essentially, it acts as a roadmap for search engines like Google, helping them crawl your site more intelligently. Sitemaps come in two primary forms: XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps.

• XML Sitemaps: These are designed specifically for search engines. They provide a structured list of all the URLs on your site, along with additional metadata about each URL, such as when it was last updated, how often it changes, and its relative importance.
• HTML Sitemaps: These are intended for human visitors. They are usually simple web pages that list all the pages on your site, making it easier for users to navigate, especially on large sites.

Why Are Sitemaps Useful?

SEO.

Search engines deploy bots (also known as spiders or crawlers) to index the content of websites. Sitemaps cam help guide these bots to the most important pages of your site, ensuring that nothing important is overlooked. It helps make the process of crawling your website more efficient – which is something any crawlbot appreciates and rewards.

Also, a big benefit of having a sitemap is that whenever you add new content to your site or make significant updates, sitemaps can help search engines discover these changes faster, leading to quicker indexing, and hopefully – your new content ranking high in SERPS sooner.

Enhanced UX.

HTML sitemaps provide visitors with an easy way to find content on your site. This is particularly beneficial for large websites with complex structures. Of course, not many users actually use sitemaps in this way – but often it can actually be helpful for you (or the person who manages your site) as it can give you a complete top-level view of all of the content across your website. You can quickly see which areas of your site might be bloated and bursting with unnecessary content, and which sections are thin and in need of some focus.

Error Detection.

Sitemaps can help identify issues such as broken links or pages that are not being crawled correctly, allowing you to address these problems promptly. If you manage your website in a tool like Google Search Console, submitting a sitemap allows GSC to find these errors and problems more quickly and efficiently – meaning you can jump on fixing them more quickly too.

Multilingual Sites.

For websites with content in multiple languages, sitemaps can include hreflang annotations to help search engines serve the correct language version of a page to users based on their geographic location and language preferences. Again, it just helps a crawlbot understand the entire layout of your website’s content, and the relationship between certain subfolders, pages, or sections.

Creating And Submitting A Sitemap.

Creating a sitemap can be straightforward with the right tools. There are several online generators and plugins available for popular content management systems (CMS) like WordPress. Once your sitemap is ready, the next step is to submit it to search engines. This is typically done through tools like Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. These platforms allow you to upload your sitemap and monitor its performance. They’re also great at flagging any errors in indexing the pages you’ve submitted as part of your sitemap too.

Best Practices For Sitemaps.

• Keep It Updated: Regularly update your sitemap to reflect new content and changes to your site. Most plugins or tools that generate these automatically do a great job of automating the sitemap. So, as you add new content to your website, it should be automatically added to your sitemap too.
• Prioritise Key Pages: Ensure your most important pages are included and appropriately prioritised.
• Limit Sitemap Size: Each sitemap should not exceed 50,000 URLs or 50MB. If your site is larger, you can create multiple sitemaps and use a sitemap index file to manage them. However, it’s quite rare a website would exceed this size or volume.
• Use Clean URLs: Ensure the URLs listed in your sitemap are clean and free from unnecessary parameters or session IDs. A frequent culprit for this can often be query strings or parameters that might be used around your site for functionality (ie. search queries, filters, forms, etc). If these accidentally get caught within your sitemap, they can lead to the sitemap being artificially inflated and your site appearing much bigger and more bloated than it actually is.

Conclusion.

Sitemaps are an invaluable tool for both search engines, end users, and those who manage your website too. By providing a clear and structured roadmap of your website’s content, they enhance SEO, improve user experience, and help maintain the overall health of your site. 

By understanding and utilising sitemaps effectively, you can ensure that your website remains accessible, organised, and optimised for both search engines and your target audience.