While it is not crucial to include a sitemap on your website it is highly advisable although small sites don’t really need one. If you aren’t including a sitemap for SEO then it is advisable that you make sure each and every webpage is linked into the main navigation page as this will serve you well.
This is why Sitemaps are good
During design and maintenance it is important to remember that your site is accessed by both visitors and search engine robots, although in different ways, so they have a two way purpose. They make it easy for robots to crawl around your site and index your pages and they make your site user friendly for humans.
A Sitemap is usually included in the global footer or main navigation area, the main reason you include them is so that humans can find your links and use them for their benefit without having to look all over your site to find what they are looking for. If they haven’t found what they want in three clicks chances are they will lose interest and go somewhere else.
The heading and the layout should be able to show visitors how your site is laid out and a short paragraph at the top of the sitemap should be included which serves as an introduction. It is not a good idea to clutter your sitemap with graphics as all this does is distract people, try to keep it in a text format with links, and you can also include a short description of where each link will take them. Don’t forget to link all your pages to the sitemap and keep it up to date at all times, adding new links, removing old links and fixing broken ones.
Search Engine robots see sitemaps differently so this means that you will need to embed .xml files in your root directory which contain all the links to your web pages. If you want your sitemap to be accessible by robots you have to have .xml files.
Once you have accomplished this sitemap should then be referenced in the robots.txt file which is easily done simply by adding a line for the sitemap. It is important that you keep this side of your sitemap up to date as well; keeping it functional at all times will help SEO, page rankings and indexing.
Robots have difficulty navigating through images and animation, so offering them a text based sitemap will ensure they can do their job and if they do their job you benefit enormously. Newly added pages will get indexed and ranked faster, resubmitting your sitemap sends robots scurrying down to your site to check out your changes, without a sitemap it may take a while for them to realise that you have made changes and it will take that much longer for them to index and rank.
This leaves you time to concentrate on other aspects of SEO such as building links, adding more web pages, keyword research and writing relevant and interesting content.
