Sitemaps: How important are they?

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  Sitemaps and their use

  The importance of a sitemap is not appreciated very often.

  However, it is the simplest file that assures a complete guidance for a lost visitor. Also, search engines are greatly benefited during their crawl through websites. These give the URLs to every web page included in the site and enable speedy access to the desired content. The sitemaps are intended to give the “live” picture of the website at any given time. Hence, a page that has been deleted from the site may still be indicated through this navigation tool. However, the search engine can easily detect its absence due to the absence of URL. Specific software or online tools provided by the search engines help to provide the latest and automatically generated sitemap.
  
  Even though sitemaps play a vital role, there is ample evidence of websites that do not have a site map or have poorly developed ones. The problems associated with these maps include broken links, incomplete or outdated mapping, and extremely complex maps. Sitemaps are meant to help visitors retrace their steps to reach a particular content of interest. There are plenty of instances where the user searches for a key word and specific content is thrown up. However, if an attempt to directly scour the concerned website is made, the content is not easily accessible. This is a result of poor site mapping where an existing page is not efficiently displayed in the map.
  
  Sitemaps are useful in analyzing the layout of the site and provide scope to explore modifications. They enable the search engines to provide better web presence for the site. Submitting updated sitemaps enables the search engines to record the changes brought about in the site and accordingly attract traffic towards the site. It is a more proactive way of marketing, than waiting for the search engines to index the site. This is very well observed when a comparison is made between a site without a sitemap and a site having a well-developed one. The sitemaps help to reduce reliance on external third party links to bring the visitors or the search spider onto the site.
  
  Sitemaps help to restore contact with pages that are isolated through broken or missing links. They are especially useful for new web sites or for those that have incorporated new web pages with interesting content. They help the spiders to classify the content on the site and thus glean information at a faster pace. Rankings on the web depend on the easy availability of accurate and reliable information.
  
  Google is the best supporter of sitemap-driven SEO techniques, and being the largest search engine most webmasters follow its requirements. Yahoo and MSN have not yet accepted sitemaps as an important factor for indexing websites. However, the trend of submitting sitemaps to enable better profiling is likely to gather pace in the future.
  
  
  
  Developing Effective Sitemaps
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