subject: Making a Sitemap is Important For Search Engine Placement [print this page] Making a Sitemap is Important For Search Engine Placement
Is this really true or are sitemaps simply a luxury you do not need to bother with?
In order to answer this question you must first understand how your web pages get discovered and how do you make this process easy for them (after all you want to get all your pages into their results so you should make this process as easy as you can!)
The process of web page discovery is carried out by "spiders" (automated software tools that search the web) during a process known as "crawling". The spiders find new content by following links found within sites or from external sites. The following of links aspect of the process is the critical element of answering the question why a sitemap is important - if the spiders cannot find the links easily then they cannot be followed and your content will essentially become invisible to the search engines.
Having a sitemap for your site clearly signposts to the visiting spiders where all your pages are and what the link structure is between them. This facilitates the spidering process and helps to ensure that all your pages are indexed.
Without a sitemap you run the risk of some of your pages not being discovered, and it goes without saying that if a page has not even been discovered then it is impossible for it to rank well in the results!.
There are many tools available to generate (and validate) sitemaps so production and maintenance of sitemaps should not be too much of an overhead and ceratainly the production of a sitemap is an extremely worthwhile activity.
