Imagine going to a new town or city and having the task of finding every store in a specific area. You do not know the area or where everything is, so you have to rely on what you can see and find right in front of you. This can work somewhat, but you are likely to overlook some things in the process.
An alternative is to have a map. Using a map will help you to find everything you need to find in less time and much easier than you did before. Websites work similarly. When a site crawler finds your site, it is going in blind. It can look through your site based on the provided links, but it does not know where it is going, where anything is, or what to expect.
When the crawlers cannot find everything, that hurts you. It makes it harder to index your site and specific pages of your site. This can lead to little to no traffic, either on your website as a whole or on specific pages.
You Need A Sitemap
A sitemap is just that – a map of your site. When you upload a sitemap, Google crawlers can find it and automatically know where everything is. They can go through every page to know the content that is there and that the page exists. When you have a new website or page, or when you have limited traffic on your website or certain pages, this can help. It will not do much for traffic in general, but it will help with indexing your page. When the crawlers know where to go, they can find the individual pages and index them accordingly. For new or hidden pages, this is crucial. You want Google to find them and index them. An updated and current sitemap will ensure that no page gets overlooked. Remember to keep your sitemap updated. Once you have it there, you want to update it if you remove any pages, change pages, or add pages. If you have an outdated sitemap, it will make it harder for crawlers to find and index everything properly. Any 404 messages on your sitemap or any other problems will hurt your indexing and Google placement. For the sake your website’s success, you want to avoid any problems with indexing your site.
Sitemaps Are Easy To Create And Use
It is easy to create and upload a sitemap. It is the structure of your site, put on an XML file and uploaded for Google. It details where every link on your website is. Once you have that, you can upload it. If you make any changes, you can upload a new version of the file. There is nothing complex about the process or the file itself. It is something any website owner can, and should, use. It is straightforward and it works well.
Potential Success
Again, a sitemap is not part of SEO or a website’s direct success. It is part of indexing. Indexing is crucial to a site’s success, obviously, but it does not determine ranking, it merely makes sure ranking occurs. Without a sitemap, though, you might not get ranked at all. Google may overlook your site or certain portions of your site. This can take any effort of SEO marketing and ruin it, all because you have no sitemap to help the crawlers.
Never underestimate the importance of a sitemap. When crawlers begin looking through your site, you want them to quickly and accurately find everything. That is what a sitemap makes possible. It gives them the map to your site, helping the crawlers to index properly.
