What is a sitemap?

As you know by now, there are quite a few ways you can increase traffic to your website. One of the most effective tactics that you can employ to increase organic traffic is to create a sitemap. However, if you don’t have much experience with web development, you may not even know what a sitemap is.

Putting together a sitemap

The term ‘sitemap’ is defined as a list of all your site’s URLs. The sitemap includes some information about these links.

The goal of a sitemap is to help search engines understand and index your website’s content. The marvellous news is that you don’t need any special coding knowledge to create a sitemap. There are hundreds of programs on the Internet that will help you to generate a sitemap.

However, this is the general process that someone putting together a sitemap will follow:

• Step 1: Analyse the structure of your website pages
• Step 2: Give codes to your URLs
• Step 3: Verify the code
• Step 4: Put your sitemap into the root and robots.txt
• Step 5: Submit your sitemap

Sitemaps are tools that help the search engine crawlers understand your website. In addition, a sitemap helps them to find what needs to be found.

Sitemaps are files that your website visitors will never see as these are marked for the search engines only. They list every page on your site and is a valuable tool for anyone looking to grow their organic traffic.

Other benefits of using sitemaps

• As a sitemap is a list of all the pages on your site, it ensures that the search engine bots are able to find and explore exactly what you want them to
• A sitemap also includes metadata about each page. This data tells the search engine bots how your pages are organised and how they relate to each other.
• Sitemaps help users navigate your site as well.

It might be interesting to note that you don’t technically need a sitemap because search engine bots will eventually find your website and index it on their own. However, just because they can find your site, it doesn’t mean they will find everything you want it to know. So if you have a small website or a slightly large one, a sitemap will boost your organic traffic.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

As the online world becomes more crowded by every single day, so the need to optimise your website becomes more important. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Web Analytics is not a luxury. It’s an absolute necessity – if you want your website to be found by your customers. The Digital School of Marketing’s SEO and Web Analytics Course will teach you what it takes for your website to reach the number one spot on search engine results pages (SERPs). If you have a passion for digital marketing, statistics and technical knowledge of websites, then this course is for you!