I have worked with web design for some time now and that does not make me an expert, I am still learning. In looking at a website being worked on for a small college, each page has a sitemap at the bottom of the page. I do understand the importance of a sitemap for both the user and search engines and have read about an XML sitemap. I was told the reason for the sitemap on every page is to help with SEO. In the sitemap section there are over 100 text hyperlinks. Is this good practice for the design and content of the website? With my studies in web design, it appears as additional, redundant content, taking up page real estate. Any info is appreciated.
The importance of sitemapping is roughly underestimated. For SEO, it' golden. SE spiders love to crawl on a sitemap. It's a great way to help your site to get indexed faster, thus to improve rankings, because the map is the first to inform SE of any changes on your website.
When building a sitemap, make sure it's compliant with Google Sitemap format.
Sitemaps are basically collection of a website URL’s. Sitemaps don’t affect the content and design of a website
Significance of sitemaps
-Easier navigation for users(HTML sitemap)
-Deep crawling for spiders(XML sitemap)
Creating sitemap manually is a onerous task and I would suggest you to take help of sitemap building tools to fasten the process.There are various sitemap generators available online. For more information you can also take help of Google webmaster tools.
See a site map is virtually the architecture of a website and most important for crawlers. Now because site map is link to all the published pages of it is but natural that spiders would like to see what all you have in stored
I totally validate the explanation given by c. Rebecca.
Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don't have a sitemap. When you have a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, you rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site. Sitemaps can even help with messy internal links...
I have worked with web design for some time now and that does not make me an expert, I am still learning. In looking at a website being worked on for a small college, each page has a sitemap at the bottom of the page. I do understand the importance of a sitemap for both the user and search engines and have read about an XML sitemap. I was told the reason for the sitemap on every page is to help with SEO. In the sitemap section there are over 100 text hyperlinks. Is this good practice for the design and content of the website? With my studies in web design, it appears as additional, redundant content, taking up page real estate. Any info is appreciated.
Bob McP
You don't need the sitemap on every page. The xml sitemap doesn't need to actually shown on your site at all, it can be stored away in the root of your domain. The search engines will find it but it is advisable to send it to them anyway whenever you make changes to the site.
I'm not sure what the text hyperlinks are? If your site has good navigation and you make use of hyperlinks to other pages within each pages's content, you don't need a separate sitemap as well.
Sitemap containing all accessible URLs on the site and help to surfers navigate! this encourage search engine spiders.
generate a Sitemap and Download the sitemap file than put it into the domain root folder of your site. Go to your Google Webmaster account and add sitemap URL.
For a website sitemap is very very important. Normally there are two types of sitemap one is xml sitemap and other is html sitemap .XML sitemap for the web crawlers and HTML sitemap for the website visitors.
XML sitemap is an xml file contains list of URLs of a site. It gives search engines useful information about your site such as list of URLs on your site, How often the pages on your website change, last modified date of each page. Html sitemap helps the visitors for easier navigation. It is easy to create sitemap using tools than manually.
Site maps are at the heart of Search Engine Friendly Design. They make it very quick and easy for the search engines to find and index every page on your web site by putting links to every page in one spot. I will recommend both HTML and XML sitemaps.
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Originally Posted by rbmscc
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