When people ask me for advice on building a website, I always tell them the same thing. Don’t forget the sitemap! For some reason, sitemaps are often neglected when many people build a website, and that is a big mistake! Sitemaps are like a road map for your website. They give you an overall view of the content on a website. Sitemaps list every page you have included on your website and show the entire structure of the site itself.

I think the top benefit of having a sitemap on your page is that makes it easier for visitors to navigate around your website. Almost everyone I know cannot stand to visit a website that has poor navigation. Having a sitemap lays everything out, so that your visitors can easily traverse from one page to the other. This will inevitably help increase the amount of traffic you receive, because people will enjoy visiting your page because it is so easy to use!

Sitemaps also enable you yourself to be able to organize your website better. Should you ever desire to add or delete content to a certain page, you can easily look at the site map to determine where the new content should go, or where it should be deleted from. Having your sitemap right there helps you to keep relevant items together, making the website appear more organized to both you and visitors. And just as visitors love an easily navigated site, they love an organized site as well.

Using your sitemap to keep your site organized will also help you to properly convey your websites theme. Let’s say I have a blog about gardening and housekeeping on a budget. Without a sitemap, a visitor may click on a page and think the entire site is just about gardening on a budget. Maybe they were looking for housekeeping on a budget. They might leave my site thinking it doesn’t have what they are offering. But with a sitemap, they can easily see that I do have information about gardening and housekeeping, and are more likely to stay and browse around because with the sitemap they can get the big picture of my entire theme.

Finally, having a sitemap will help increase the amount of traffic to your page through search engines. If a search engine hits on just one page of your website, it will then follow all of the links that are on your site map. When this happens, each and every page on your site will get indexed by the search engine, which can increase your page ranking and increase the number of visitors you will receive.

So remember, if you are building a website, don’t forget the sitemap! While it may not seem like a very big deal, I promise, it is. It will help make your website a much nicer place for everyone to visit by making it organized and easy to navigate and make them much more likely to return.

Tags: SEO, sitemaps

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