Well, I’m glad you asked. As I mentioned yesterday I would be diving into sitemaps a little more in-depth this week I thought the best thing to do is explain first what exactly a sitemap really is.
I have always made the analogy that a sitemap of a website is similar to that of a mall map. Stores can come and go and the map is constantly updated like that of a website. It will reference the main points of a website. An example would be under Customer Service you might find Contact Us – Billing Issues – FAQ’s – Online Support – Chat Support – etc…
Below is snapshot of the sitemap for a sports introduction site that’s currently in development:
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Since I use Wordpress pretty exclusively I have found a plugin that generates the content into an XML file (.com/sitemap.xml) – this is good news for when you submit your website to search engines. More on that later.
You don’t have to use a “plugin” and can actually create one yourself but then again why recreate the wheel, right?
So, why do you need a sitemap for your website? Well, as I stated earlier it could help a reader figure out where exactly something is. Remember it IS like a map – of your content. This is big for site that end up growing over the years.
The second reason you need to make a sitemap is for search engines and I will dive more into this tomorrow but by having them for web crawlers they are able to crawl your content quicker and index your site.
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