Although there are scores of ways in SEO to make your website rise to top spots on search engines, there is something called sitemaps, which is so important yet people underplay its importance. A Site map is the main aspect of getting your site designed in a Search Engine Friendly manner. With Site maps, you are actually gathering all the links to each and every page in one sitemap page, and this makes it easier for search engines to index all the pages on a website.

A sitemap is a map of a website that is used to demonstrate the entire structure of the site, its subdivisions etc. With a Sitemap, the navigation is clear and hence it is easier to understand how to use the website and find information. A sitemap not only optimizes the site for easy navigation for the users, it also optimizes the site for search engines by explaining clearly to the search engine spiders about the places to be visited in the website.

Although Site maps has been around for quite some time, its importance came out to the fore only after it was considered as a SEO factor by search engine algorithms. However, having just one site map for a site is never enough. The reason is that the one sitemap cannot do the job of catering to two different kinds of audience, namely the human visitor and the search engines. That is why it is necessary to maintain two versions of the same site map: one should be designed in a way that it can be easily understood by humans, and the other designed especially to cater to the search engine spiders.

With Site maps, you also get the exclusive chance for optimizing the keyword density for your website. You can do a research on the best keywords for your site based on its niche, and use these keywords as much as possible in your site maps too, apart from using it in the web pages. Make sure that all the links are in plain text and connect to each and every page in the website with proper explanation. This makes it easier for both human visitors and search engine spiders to get an idea of what they can find on each of the pages linked to by the sitemap.

The Benefits of Using Site Maps are many:

You get easier navigation for your websites

Sitemap acts as a valuable to tool to inform search engines faster about changes made in your website.

Your website improves in search engine visibility

With Sitemaps, you can classify the content in your site under various categories.

How to get your Sitemap underway? - All you should do to create a sitemap for your site is to generate the sitemap, upload it to your website, and give Google a notification that you have added a sitemap. You can download a sitemap generator and install it yourself; this allows you to have better control over the output. However, if you want to do it the easy way, you can use a sitemap generation tool available online. If you are using the sitemap generator, remember that it is a Python script, so make sure your Web server has the Python 2.2 or later versions installed. There is a lot of stuff available online which you can use, for example you can download free tools for sitemaps like sitemap generators, sitemap plug-ins etc. Once you have formed the sitemap, the next job is to upload it to the website and inform Google that you have added a sitemap to your website. This you can do by including your site to your Google Sitemaps account. So if you don’t have a Google Sitemaps account yet, go get it now.