Top 10 Reasons Why a Sitemap is Important for a Website
Search engines can find your web pages even without submitting a sitemap. But having a sitemap surely has many advantages.
Following is the list of the top 10 reasons why a sitemap is important for a website
1. Improved crawlability
A well-structured sitemap can inform search engine crawlers about the architecture of your website and all the important pages within it. So that, crawlers can find all pages by following the right path.
Even without submitting the sitemaps to search engines, crawlers will find your pages eventually by following the link. But direct submission of sitemaps will make this process much faster.
In that way, a sitemap will make the job of the crawler much easier by giving a detailed structure of your website and all pages within it. Understandably, it will improve the crawlability of your website.
2. Increase Search Visibility
Because a sitemap will improve both the crawlability and indexability of a website. Using sitemap search engine crawlers can easily find your website and important pages.
This proper crawling of the website and its pages will also increase indexability. A website owner can also use sitemaps to prioritize the most important pages within the website.
Thus, as a website owner, you can ensure that all your important pages are within the Google Index. This will certainly improve the search visibility of your content.
3. Improves Traffic
A well-structured sitemap will allow search engines like Google to better understand the site structure and important pages. This will speed up indexing and ensure efficient use of the crawl budget.
The efficient and faster indexing will increase the chances for the appearance of your pages higher on search engine result pages.
Yes, many other factors influence the ranking of your pages. But without being discovered by the search engines your pages can't appear on search results. Submitting a sitemap will surely improve the indexability of your website.
4. Improves website navigation
Because a good sitemap will help both search engines and users quickly find important pages. A sitemap will give a detailed picture of the website architecture and all pages within it. So, with an accessible site map users don't feel any confusion in finding the pages they looking for.
It can be extremely helpful when a website has lots of pages. Thus, a well-structured sitemap will help both search engine crawlers and users find important pages easily no matter how big the website.
5. Improve user experience
A user should feel no confusion in finding anything important while visiting your website. Using an accessible sitemap a user can effortlessly find any webpage. In addition, a sitemap group together or categorize webpages in the right order.
So that a user has to look within the right category to find a particular page. This will help the user to save both time and effort.
Apart from all these, sitemaps also help the users get updated information by improving indexibility and crawlability. Understandably, users feel satisfied and happy.
6. SEO optimization
A sitemap will help the website owner to enhance SEO in different ways. First of all, a sitemap allows search crawlers to deeply understand site structure and content hierarchy. This will help the search engines to index the pages quickly and accurately.
As you know, indexing is one of the important stages in SEO. Apart from categorizing the pages you can prioritize important pages using sitemap. By following this method you can ensure indexing of important pages first.
Sitemap will also identify the new changes within the content and save them to the index. This will help your content to stay relevant. This will surely improve your website's SEO ranking.
Listing and right categorization of webpages by a sitemap also improve navigation. So that users feel no confusion while using the website. This improved user experience can also help you improve your SEO ranking.
7. Improve website authority
A website with many valuable blog posts and backlinks surely has strong website authority. So, how sitemap can help to improve website authority?
By speeding up the indexation of important pages and updation. Writing in-depth content is not enough. You have to make sure your important pages are properly indexed by major search engines.
By listing, properly categorizing, and prioritizing content a sitemap will fasten indexation of the most important pages of a website. This will create chances for higher ranking and getting quality backlinks. As a result, you will see improvement in website authority.
8. Help to improve the internal linking structure
To improve the internal linking of your website you should have a deep understanding of how different pages are related to each other.
Using a properly updated sitemap you can understand the architecture of the website, categorization, and most important pages. This detailed view provided by a sitemap will give to clear idea of how different pages are related and which pages have the least or no links.
So, this will make it easier for you to improve the internal linking structure of your website.
9. Speed Up indexing of most important pages
Because you can prioritize important pages using a sitemap. Using a priority tag you can tell the search engine how important a page is. You can set values from 0.0 to 1.0. Understandably 1.0 is the highest value.
Remember, you have to decide which page will be most useful for the users before setting. The values. Following this method you can speed up the indexing of your most important pages.
In that way, you can make sure users will see relevant and important content first on search engine result pages. It will surely improve both traffic and conversion.
10. Help to signal the search engines about new changes within the content
Updating your content is crucial to stay relevant. Making the required changes is not enough. The updated content should be indexed by the search engine for the rank boost.
Sitemaps can signal search engines about new changes within your content in several different ways.
Submitting an updated sitemap will help the search engines identify all important changes within the content. Also, you can use changefreq attribute in the XML sitemap to indicate how often the content may change.
The changefreq attribute different values - yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly, always, and never. These values help search engine crawlers decide how often should they crawl the pages. This will ensure efficient crawling and indexation of updated content.