Adding site maps to your website will help your human visitors, search engine and yourself. Humans like to be able to easily find things and amazingly........so do search engines!!
Simply put, it's a web page that contains a schematic view of the files that make up your website.
Visitors go to site maps if they are lost, frustrated, or looking for specific details on a crowded site. A site map's main benefit is to give users an overview of the site in a single glance by dedicating an entire page to a visualization of the information architecture.
If designed well, this overview can include several levels of hierarchy, and yet not get so big that users lose their ability to grasp the map as a whole. The simplest form is an A - Z listing of file names with a brief explanation of the page, displayed in a table or lists. Although there are many tools available to help you create complex site maps, to suit your needs.
A simple mantra to remember is that "Users LOVE on-site search". They love the feeling that they are in charge and can go to pages they want to visit - not just following the route you would like
them to use through your site. Make the visitors happy and they will revisit, tell their friends, write about your site and bookmark you.
Most people accept that Google is currently the most well known search engine. Getting your site indexed by Google helps with getting indexed in many other search systems too - they often buy result details from Google. So doing something that aids Google and may help yourself is not a bad idea.
We recommend that you use the he "Google Sitemap" that allows webmasters to inform search engines about URLs on their website that are available for crawling. The "Google Sitemap" is actually an XML file that lists the URLs for a site using the "Google Sitemap" Protocol. The Sitemap Protocol is only a supplement and does not replace the existing crawl-based mechanisms that search engines use to discover URLs.
By submitting a Sitemap to a search engine, you are only helping that engine’s crawlers to do a better job of indexing your site.
Using this protocol does not guarantee that your web pages will be included in search indexes nor does it influence the way your pages are ranked by a search engine - but it could help!!
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