Should I get a Site Map?

By admin

If you’ve been in the blogging world for any extended period of time, most likely you’ve heard of a sitemap. If you look at most popular blogs, you’ll see it as link in their header bar. The question is though, what is a sitemap? And what good is it? Because your real question is, should I have one? Hopefully I can answer that question for you.

First off, what is a site map.

A sitemap is essentially a list of links, that shows all the posts in your blog. It can be either HTML or XML, but I won’t complicate things by getting to into thoughs, but essentially, if it’s XML, then only the search engine will see it, if it’s HTML then the reader will see it as well.

An HTML sitemap, like the one I have here, is a list of all the posts on my site. An XML one will be similar, but it’s designed for only the search engine to see. Pretty much every site has a sitemap, but most are XML, so you don’t even know they’re there.

Now, is a site map worth anything? And should you have one?

The answer is Yes! to both questions.

There are two purposes for a site map; number one, to be a literally a map through your site. If you look at the one I have, it’s set up into categories so that you can easily read through my posts, and find the ones that sounds interesting, and read them. It’s a great way to get readers, by letting them choose what they want to read, because they pick them from the list. In addition, this helps your old posts be of some relevancy again. Once your post leaves the first page, typically it’s buried, and won’t be seen again unless it’s receiving search engine traffic. By having a sitemap, you can advertise those posts again. Also, you want the Anchor Text that is the link of your blog post, to be the search term your trying to rank for, it helps with your SEO.

The second main reason, is for search engines. Having a sitemap, allows the search engine to come to your site, and then find every post on your site easily and quickly. This will greatly help your site with google and yahoo. This means more of your pages will be indexed, and be included in the search engine’s searches. Often on blogs that don’t have very good “On Page Optimization,” many of their posts are never found by google, and so even if it’s great content, you won’t receive the reward for your labor. So my advice to you is to create a sitemap. But now you may be wondering, first, how do I make one? and which type do I make? Personally, I’d make both, that’s what I did.

You can easily make an HTML one, by just creating a new page to your site, and writing out your search terms, with the links to your blogs posts, and then just posting it in your header.

To make an XML one, is a little bit more difficult, but also can be done. Just go to your google account, and add the application, webmaster tools. Under that it will automatically create a XML one for you. That also shows some great information about your site, so I would highly recommend adding it, even if your not planning on making a sitemap.  Creating a site map will greatly help your rankings in the search engines, if that type of traffic is one of your goals, then definitely make one.