Almost every website has a homepage, contact page, an “about us” page etc. But must every website have a sitemap page as well? This has been a matter of discussion among the webmasters for a long time and we find that there are many websites today that still do not have a sitemap page. What really is the Sitemap and how is it useful? Well, a sitemap is just as the word suggests, a map of the entire website. From a sitemap page you are not far from any of the numerous pages on the site with just a single, or may be two clicks. It is a very convenient navigational structure.

The Google webmaster guideline recommends to have a sitemap on the website. It also suggests that with 100 or more links on a sitemap, it is always better to break the site map into separate pages. For websites with thousands of web pages, one must categorize the pages and emphasize links to the core pages throughout the site. One can add a single link to each core page with a descriptive paragraph about the page's content and then link deep into the site from such core pages.

Websites with pages that run into tens of thousands of pages must have sitemap content with multiple layers and hierarchies based on contextual themes and divisions. Some times very huge websites (with such contextual top-level site map) are accompanied by a type of mapping that consists of a series of links to different websites.

 

So how can we generate a sitemap? There are two methods;

 

 

The search engine spiders and bots are often not able to go deep and index web pages. A sitemap will allow the search engine spiders to easily crawl the entire website. That is why having a sitemap is an SEO activity. Many sitemap creation tools are available for a fee or even for free. 

The author of this article is Ricci Mathew of OSI (Outsource Strategies International), a US based company that offers services in Search Engine Optimization.