How Sitemaps Help In To Improve Traffic Through Search Engines?

by SONIKA DHALIWAL Professional

Sitemaps are one of the effective SEO tools. It is quite obvious that the search engine could not possibly reach all the pages easily. As a result, many pages are left unreachable. These pages are basically the dynamically generated AJAX and FLASH pages. So, Sitemap comes in for the rescue of the Webmasters.

Sitemaps help in by telling the search engines regarding the way to reach all the important pages. There are many e-commerce sites that generate pages from the database. Rather these sitemaps help in for proper indexation of the different pages. At the same time, more traffic is attracted by the pages which receive indexation from the search engine. Even the new websites launched whose pages are yet to receive indexation by the search engines could even tell these engines about all the pages.

What is Sitemap?

Previously, Sitemaps were the HTML files that had one list of the entire link belonging to every page of any site. It was beneficial for the content sites which has a different matter on every page. These sites make use of the Sitemap in order to help the visitors to view all the issues at one glance. So, the reader could easily choose and select any particular page to read. Even the link of the Sitemap must be included on every page so that it can be easily noticed by the visitors. Now the e-commerce sites have their own orientation. They, first of all, prefer to sell their product to the visitors rather than expecting them to wander all around the sites. But, at the same time, they would wish to get all the prices indexed by the search engine. So, in order to cater to both the objectives, they would include a link of the Sitemaps on the homepage itself.

However, with time these sitemaps got more formalized. Now, they are made available in the XML, ROR or in text format. The text sitemaps only provide the list of URLs while the ROR and XML sitemaps provide even the related additional details of the URLs. In the XML sitemap, even the priority wise information of one URL to the other can be provided while the ROR sitemaps allow even comparatively including more information.

Special about the new Sitemaps

Sitemaps help the search engine to crawl the site in a more intelligent manner. They help the engine to provide enhanced weight to important pages. Moreover, even the crawling over the pages should be scheduled and synchronized. So, it can be referred to as one of the Webmaster setting preferences.

All the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask have already adopted the standard XML sitemap. So, one can easily tell the search engines to locate the Sitemaps by entering the informative line format. The status of the indexations, traffic stat figure and the keywords put in use help in easy landing to the pages. Mere creating Sitemaps would not help, rather a regular update needs to be made.