Understanding the Importance of Sitemaps for Businesses
Creating a coherent sitemap isn’t just for designers. Everyone working on your site should have a complete understating of your site from top to bottom. The importance of sitemaps can’t be overstated.
From ensuring that your design remains coherent to making the user experience as efficient as possible, a sitemap is a key to allowing search engines to find content.
Webcrawlers walk through your site via your sitemap. They can get tripped up by hard to navigate sites with broken links and clunky design.
Here are three reasons you should prioritize your sitemap.
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Good Design Starts with Your Sitemap
When visitors first land on your page, you want them to know immediately how to find what they’re looking for. If you get lots of emails or hits through your support link, you need to re-engineer your sitemap.
From your menu location to individual page layout, you want to be aiming for a coherent design. Each page should be easy to read and lead logically from one to the next.
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Stay on Top of SEO
Search engines are more likely to show results of sites they’ve easily crawled and indexed. A sitemap with dead links will be rejected by search engine robots. A strong link structure leads to strong SEO results.
A webcrawler wants to be able to hit every link, have them be live, get the metadata it needs for search results, and then move onto the next site. Having your site rejected means that you won’t get the traffic you want.
This can be a hit for sites that rely on hits for revenue.
If you add to your site often, you should regularly use an SEO site validator to double check your sitemap. Once you start damaging SEO results, it’s a slippery slope down search engine rankings.
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Keep Your Website Relevant
Your sitemap should help you keep an overview of your site’s structure. You should be able to see which branches need more content, where you can build out, and where you might want to scale back.
If your sitemap is disorganized, don’t scrap the whole thing. Work with your team to see how it can be fixed. More than likely, a few tweaks will allow you to build a base of followers and expand into new territory.
Optimizing your sitemap’s efficiency will allow a robust internal linking structure, keeping visitors on your site longer and building your brand authority.
Never Underestimate the Importance of Sitemaps
Making a site easy to use is good for your current client base as well as your prospective clients. Since strong SEO is important to the vitality of your business, make sure you know the ins-and-outs of sitemaps.
The importance of sitemaps should be a component of every company interested in strong SEO practices. Read our blog for more information on good SEO practices.
