Value of an XML sitemap in SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a vital tool in the armory of anyone who is looking to get the best possible return on their website – whether that is making money or simply getting as many people reading the page as possible. SEO is big business and hugely important to the success of any site.

Getting 'good SEO' means ranking high in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for any given keyword, so if you wanted your page to appear in the front page of Google SERPs for a phrase such as “XML Sitemap” you would try engineer the site so that happens.

How Creating an XML Sitemap Can Help

A vital, but often overlooked, tool in trying to ensure that your page finishes high in the SERPs is the XML Sitemap. Too many people focus simply on keywords, or creating back links – the humble sitemap often gets overlooked, which is a big mistake.

By creating sitemap you are telling the search engine where to look at, where to send the spiders that it uses to index sites. It helps ensure that pages on the site get indexed in the search engines directory.

So how does that help from an SEO perspective?

Think for a moment. Are ALL your pages accessible simply by browsing your webpage, or do you have any you haven't linked to? If you have some unlinked pages then search engines won't be able to find the. Their spiders work by following links, if you don't have links then the pages won't be found.

An XML sitemap changes that. It provides a central place, written in the XML protocol, that all the URLs are found at. By submitting this to the search engines you give them a map of your site, a map that lets them find what you want indexed.

A sitemap also ensures that the search engines can find pages it wouldn't otherwise index. Flash pages, for example, are notoriously difficult to get indexed on search engines, with their content not easy to be found by spiders. By giving a sitemap you show the search engine where and what is contained on those pages.

But it is not just getting your page easily searched that a sitemap can help with. It also provides another type of SEO boost, a more direct one. All search engines, Google especially, loves pages that are easy to navigate, well designed. A sitemap helps tell them that your site is just that.

This means that it will rank any sites higher, higher up the SERPs, that are easy to use. Or put another way, a sitemap will give you a better SERP position than not having one. Which is pretty much the whole point of SEO.

So as you can see, putting together an XML sitemap and submitting it to search engines is an essential part of any SEO campaign. If you want to attract the most visitors to your site that you can then creating an XML sitemap is an important step. Don't overlook it.

What Is An XML Sitemap?

Anyone who has set up a web page and looked into any sort of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at all will have heard people say that it is important to get an XML Sitemap. What is far rarer is having someone explain to you what one actually is. It's all well and good knowing you need one, but what on Earth is it that you need?