Sitemaps
Sitemap is a list of links or page’s of a website that are accessible to users. Moreover sitemaps provide a general top-down view on the overall contents of a website. A good and simple sitemap supports the usability of a website. Sitemaps can be created in different formats like XML, ROR and TEXT.
Use of Sitemaps
Search engines send software programs known as spiders or crawler to evaluate the content of a website. Consider a site with thousands of pages; it will be easier for search engine crawlers to find the new or modified pages to be indexed from a sitemap rather than to find by itself. All related links of a webpage cannot be included in a single webpage. In this kind of scenario, the sitemaps become handy to improve the SEO efforts.
From user’s perspective, a sitemap can be used to scan the contents of a website at a glance. Instead of clicking the links in the home page, smart user clicks on the link provided in the site maps to browse. So sitemaps can be considered as the index of a website.
How often to update a sitemap
Big search engines like Google and Yahoo provide options for website owners to add their sitemaps in their sites. Webmaster can login to their webmasters section in google/yahoo and add update or remove sitemaps.
There is not any hard and fast rule to update a sitemap, but sitemaps has to be updated when ever a new link or a webpage is added to a website. Apart from updating a sitemap within a website, the sitemaps have to be updated with the search engines. If you are updating content regularly, then it would be a better idea to update your sitemaps too.
Sitemaps have become unavoidable for websites from a search engines point of view. Major search engines allow large sites to submit a maximum of 2.5 billion URLs with a single Sitemap Index URL. If the website has more number of urls, another sitemap index url can be added.
Websites like sitemapxml.net can generate sitemaps automatically for you instantly.
