Use of Sitemaps?
Sitemap is a handy tool for both users and Search Engines.
How sitemaps are useful for normal users (visitors)?
Sitemap help users (visitors) to navigate on your site much easier. The sitemap helps users to find inner pages on your website. For such usage we use the HTML or PHP sitemap. In this sitemap, you need to list all the pages on your website, which shows the exact structure of your website.
Importance of Sitemap for SEO
Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines. Using sitemaps you tell search engines the total number of pages available on your website, the importance of each page and there by request search engines to crawl each pages and get it listed in search result.
Which sitemap format to use?
We would recommend to use 2 or 3 different formats of sitemaps concurrently on your website.
You might ask why 2 or 3 sitemaps is necessary. I will explain you why you need 2 or 3 sitemaps. The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders (Google, MSN and Yahoo).
For humans we use an HTML or PHP sitemap.
Google accepts sitemaps in XML format. Since we pay high attention to Google, we need an XML format sitemap. Yahoo and MSN accepts sitemaps in TEXT format. You may simply add all the url's under your website in a text file and save it as sitemap.txt.
In addition to easy navigation and better visibility by search engines, sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. You cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly you can expect much faster indexing compared to when you don't have a sitemap.
Sitemaps can help with messy internal links. It helps to indicate the broken internal links or those internal links that cannot be reached anyway.
Using sitemaps, you may rely less on external links that will bring search engine to your website. Sitemaps plays a vital role in the success of relatively new site or if you have a significant number of new pages.
Using a sitemap might not generate huge advantages right away but as search engines improve their algorithms, it is expected that the importance of sitemap will increase and you will certainly feel its advantages.
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