Importance of Sitemap Page in your website

Howdy Folks,

Hope you people are rocking in your life!!! Well it’s being long I have not written any new fresh SEO article. Today I finally decided to come up with new topic, picking some time from my busy schedule.

Today I am going to talk about the hottest topic now a day – Sitemap. About the importance of Sitemap to rank well in search engines there are many SEO tips and tricks that help in optimizing a site but one of those, the importance of which is sometimes underestimated is sitemaps.

Sitemap, as the name simply speaks of is like a map of your website – i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, etc. Sitemap helps in making navigation easier for your site and keeping an updated Sitemap on your site is fruitful both for your users and for search engines. It is an important way of communication with search engines. By providing sitemap page to your site you tell search engines where you’d like them to go, while in robots.txt you tell search engine which parts of your site to exclude from indexing.

Sitemap have always been part of best Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they become even more important. However, it is necessary to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view; you can't go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! and MSN still keep to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.

One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders (for now mainly Googlebot but it is reasonable to expect that other crawlers will join the club shortly). In that relation it is necessary to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In 'Introduction to Sitemaps', Google explicitly states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalty for your site.

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