brand marketing blog

It's good website design practice to include a sitemap as part of your site structure. On the one hand a sitemap helps visitors to find pages that may be less obvious through the standard menu navigation system, but more importantly it makes your site more visible to search engine crawlers, spiders and robots.

The more complex your site, the more essential a quality sitemap becomes. In the early stages of your new website it's probably manageable to manually create an HTML sitemap, but as your site content grows (very desirable) it will become difficult/impossible to keep your sitemap up to date.

There are automated tools available that will create a good sitemap for your website. Google developed the standard for the XML sitemap that has been adopted by most of the other major search engines such as Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing. This sitemap generator can create a comprehensive structural map of your site that will allow Google and other search engines to easily crawl all pages and index them effectively.

If a page does not get indexed it will not appear in search results, so best to put some effort into your sitemap, in addition to other search engine optimisation techniques. As with all aspects of making your site perform better in organic searches, it does take a bit of time and effort.