Why is A Sitemap Important To SEO?

Many people make the mistake of overlooking the sitemaps for their website, often the way of thinking is that the site already contains a very good navigation menu. Why bother to add a sitemap too? When search engine spiders land on a website, they go through all of the links they can find. If these are in one place it makes the indexing process much faster. If not, sub-pages with relevant content can be missed and that can adversely affect the ranking of the website. It`s a good practice to have a link to an HTML sitemap of each page of the website while an XML sitemap can be submitted directly to search engines.

So why exactly are sitemaps so important? Well, to understand that you have to know what happens when a new site is made active. Search engines have to keep their listings up to date or else people will stop using them and they`ll lose ads revenue. In order to do this they send out a bunch of search engine spiders. No, these aren`t real arachnids. They`re essentially programs which go to a page on the website and follow the links found there to determine what the site`s about, what the keywords are and, most of all, how relevant the content is. That`s where the sitemap comes in.