What is a sitemap and how does it affect SEO?

Making it easy for Google to find you website pages

In the Dental Media blog you will find a wide range of topics, from holistic overviews of various web marketing techniques through to detailed descriptions of some of the important component parts. Today we will drill right down into one of the key tools which should be installed as standard on a website but is still all too often neglected…. the humble sitemap.

Before we look at what a sitemap is and how it is beneficial, let’s step back a little and recap on how Google finds your website pages and then ranks them in its search index………

Search engine spiders

A search engine spider is software that “crawls” the web and automatically retrieves page data for the purpose of indexing. Google’s search spider is known as “Googlebot” and you may also hear other terms like “web crawler”. The information which is retrieved by search spiders is fed to search engines which index it. The position of a web page in the search engine results pages (SERPS) is determined by a complex algorithm that looks at multiple factors, for example the quality of a web page, it’s age, how many pages link back to it etc. Google advises that it looks at over 200 “ranking factors” within its algorithm.

The process above starts with the web spider actually finding your page – if it can’t, then quite simply you don’t feature in the search results. This is where the sitemap plays a useful role……..

What is a sitemap?

A sitemap is essentially a file, often in ‘XML’ format that lists all of the pages in your website. It gives simple information, such as the web page urls, which act as a signpost for the web spider – basically it points the spider in the right direction and make its job of finding your pages much easier.

Search engine spiders will eventually find your pages simply by following links from other pages on your own site and any back-links you have, however this can take longer and it is sometimes a little hit-and-miss. Thus it is much more consistent to employ a sitemap and, given that the process is actually quite simple, it’s not an onerous task.

How do I get a sitemap and how do I use it?

This depends on the web platform you use. For example, this WordPress blog uses a free plugin to generate and update it’s sitemap automatically. It’s also clever enough to let Google know when new content has been added so that pages appear in minutes in the search index.

For standard websites, you can generate a sitemap using freely available tools and then load it to your web space. This should be updated when you add new content.

A recommended source for free sitemap generation is XML-Sitemaps.com.

The effect on SEO

The more pages of your website that the search engines can see and rank, the more trust and authority they will allocate. This assumes that the page quality is good of course. Website trust and authority are considered to be important ranking factors and more indexed pages normally equates to more site visits. So although a small component, an up-to-date sitemap is very useful sign-post for search spiders and for underpinning your website SEO.

Does your website have a sitemap? If you’d like us to check free-of-charge, please call us on 01332 672548.

(Image credit Business 2 Community)