Site Maps - More SEO Benefits

How Sitemaps Fit into Search Engine Optimisation

Trying to get web pages listed as highly as possible in the search engine results pages (SERPS) is a challenge that faces all those who own or manage websites. Some of the main ongoing tasks which contribute positively to higher ranking include adding plenty of high quality, high relevance text rich content, plenty of high quality incoming links, and ensuring that there are regular updates to the website.

Getting Your Web Pages Found and Returned in the SERPS

Since search engines such as Google are major referrers of visitors to web pages, it is important that these search engines know about and list as many pages from your website as possible for the important key phrases.

SEO theory points to webmasters ensuring that individual web pages within their websites are focused on one main key phrase each. In doing so, pages can be more relevant individually, and therefore make the relevance of the whole website higher, thus increasing the chance of gaining favour with the search engine algorithms.

The Role of the Sitemap

The sitemap’s role hasn’t really changed, but the amount of things related to your web pages that a sitemap can be used to tell search engines about has expanded so that sitemaps are not only more relevant to SEO than ever, but now link in more closely than ever to Google’s search engine technology.

Visible or html sitemaps have and still have 2 main purposes. Firstly they provide a single visible page in a website which can be used by human visitors for navigation purposes. Secondly, search engines can use the visible / html sitemap as a single point which enables them to discover all the other pages in the website.

Although it is unlikely that Google will list all pages even if it does know about them, the visible sitemap at least plays a role in increasing the likelihood of getting more pages to appear in the SERPS for more keywords.

The XML sitemap and the many uses of it have marked the biggest change in terms of the sitemap’s wider role in SEO. Sitemaps, like web pages, can now be focused on specific things. By signing up to Google’s Webmaster Tools, or by using a variety of third party websites, it is possible to relatively easily create XML sitemaps which give Google information which has relevance to the rankling of the pages e.g. when pages were last modified, and how frequently they are updated. Individual sitemaps and sitemap extensions can be created to give Google information about the individual elements of a web page e.g. the images, the videos, the news section, or any publicly available code that you wish to share.

Sitemaps can also be created for websites aimed specifically at those who surf the Web using mobile devices. As long as these sitemaps, or at the very least even a text file listing URLs are written using the common sitemaps Protocol that the big search engines subscribe to and understand (see sitemaps.org), there is a chance the various elements of your web pages could rank in the various types of searches now available in Google. A greater number of focused sitemaps could potentially mean more visitors and more natural incoming links.

Another wider role for an XML sitemap is to enhance or the process by which Google first finds out about, categorises, and ranks new web pages. With more information about the new pages instantly available via the sitemaps, it is not only more helpful to Google, but is also and an additional way for Google to find out how reputable the new pages are. Signing up to Google tools, verifying a website, and submitting clear information about all aspects of it to Google are not usually the act of spammers or those trying to deceive Google.

This being the case, it’s even possible that creating a number of sitemaps could result in new pages being picked up more quickly by search engines such as Google.