Sitemaps – What are they and do I need one?

A sitemap is a collection of hyperlinks that outlines a website’s structure. These links allow visitors to quickly navigate to any section of a website listed in the sitemap.

What are the advantages to having a sitemap?

Well, in addition to making it easier for your visitors to navigate their way around your site, sitemaps also make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl your site. This can improve your site’s search engine optimization by making sure that all the pages can be found. This will increase your search engine visibility, as well as your traffic.

And since most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, having a sitemap ensures that search engines and visitors alike can access all the content on your site.

Do you need a sitemap?

Well, it depends on your site. If your site only has one or two pages and hardly any content, then no. You don’t need a sitemap.

However, if your site has multiple pages and lots of content, it definitely won’t hurt to install a sitemap on your site. Here’s a good rule of thumb: Once you get to the point where you are no longer able to include all the links to your pages on your home page, then you need a sitemap.

After all, anything that will help your visitors as well as the search engines navigate your site is a good thing.

Great, Now I want to build a sitemap for my site

Ok you can use the following link to find the best sitemap creator for your site: http://code.google.com/p/sitemap-generators/wiki/SitemapGenerators