Your work as a webmaster won’t end by designing a website and hosting it on an online web server. The content which is shared on your website needs to be accessed by search engines.
There are thousands of websites on the internet which are waiting to get indexed and show up on search results and if you fail to create a sitemap for your website then your website is going to get buried in the huge pile of websites and it won’t get any recognition from search engines. Even if you are having thousands of web pages on your website it won’t matter unless it has been populated on different search engines.
If you don’t want to waste the long hours which you put into development of the website and get value for the content which you wrote on your website then you need to crawl the content which is present on your website on the search engines. Automatic crawling might take few days, months or even years to take place as there are thousands of websites lined up.
What you can do at this point is create a sitemap for your website using visual sitemap generator. All the websites have a sitemap which constitutes of all the posts which are present on that website. Now we know that every webmaster wants to get his website ranked in search engines and get heavy traffic flow. This is only possible with the help of sitemap. You can easily create sitemap using DYNO Mapper and submit it to all the search engines where you want to get your website ranked.
What is a sitemap?
Sitemap is just a single page which is having links of all the posts and pages which are present on your website. All the search engines crawl sitemap and once the sitemap is crawled, all the posts and pages which are present in that sitemap are indexed on search engine. You can think of sitemap as table of contents of a website. You can use visual sitemap generator to create sitemap for your website and a single sitemap can be submitted to different search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. Sitemaps are ideal for:-
- Newly launched websites with limited number of links or no links at all.
- A website which is having a lot of high quality content.
- A website which is having high quality content but is not linked.
- Webpages which are not accessible by Google like Flash or Ajax.
Sitemaps will also help you in easy navigation of your website and will lead to better visibility in all the search engines. Once you have submitted the sitemap to a search engine, any change which you do on your website let it be a new post will be notified to the search engine automatically.
This means that there is no need to ping the search engine and notify that changes are done in your website or you have added new content. With sitemaps it is not a compulsion that the web pages will get indexed in search engine as soon as you hit the Publish button but the indexing process will be way faster if you are not using a sitemap.
Sitemaps will also help the internal links which are present on your website. There are times that some of the broken internal links are not visible in search engines but once you have created a sitemap using DYNO mapper and submitted it on search engine, your website wont rely on the external links anymore. Orphaned or broken pages which were once not accessible will now also get indexed in search engines.
If your website is having good number of new posts or is new then sitemap is the only thing which is going to help you in getting the maximum exposure. It is a free practice and you will get traffic from different websites. It is not a compulsion to use a sitemap however it looks like in future search engines are going to make it mandatory for the webmasters to use sitemaps on their websites.
Not only sitemaps will help in getting the content present on your website indexed but also will classify the content which you will find on your website. Search engines are only going to crawl and index the content and if proper classification is not done then it might lead to bad results.
Indexing Depth
As we all know that Google spiders or robots are going to visit your website for indexing the content. The number of visits of Google robot are dependent on how often your website is being updated. If you are adding new content each day then it is expected that Google and other search engines will reach the website every day.
Indexing depths can be different for different websites as it totally depends on the layering of different levels found in the sitemap. For instance the homepage of your website is the first level page and the pages or posts which are linked to your homepage will be considered as second level pages. The pages which are linked with second level but are not connected with homepage will be considered as third level pages.
If the homepage of your website is having good ranking then the homepage along with second level pages will get indexed, however if the ranking of second level pages is not good then Google won’t be able to index both second level and interlinked third level pages.
Sitemaps can be generated using different tools. You can take help of plugins if you are using CMS software like WordPress or use visual sitemap generator for generation of sitemaps. It is a one-time process as you don’t have to ping the search engines in future for any updates.
If the sitemaps are generated properly it will help you in getting your website ranked on search engines and getting traffic from all around the world.
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