A sitemap is often considered by some web designers as redundant in the process of building a website, and that is indeed the case if you make a sitemap simply for the sake of having one on your site.
By highlighting the importance of having a well constructed sitemap, you will be able to tailor your own sitemap to suit your own needs.
1) Navigation purposes
A sitemap literally represents a map of your site. If your visitors browses your site and gets confused by the thousands of pages on your site, they can always refer to your sitemap to see wherever they are, and navigate through your pages with the utmost ease.
2) Communicating your site’s theme
When your visitors load your sitemap, they’ll get the gist of your site within a very short amount of time. There is no need to acquire the “big picture” of your site by browsing through every page, and by doing that you will be saving your visitors’ time.
3) Site optimization purposes
When you create a sitemap, you are in reality producing a single page which contains links to every individual page on your site. Imagine what happens when a search engine robot hits this page — they will follow every link on your sitemap and naturally every single page of your site gets indexed by the search engine! It is also for this purpose that a link to the sitemap has to be placed conspicuously on the front page of your website.
4) Organization and relevance
A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird’s eye view of your site structure, and whenever you want to add new content or new sections, you will be able to take the existing hierarchy into consideration just by glancing at the sitemap. As a result, you’ll have a perfectly organized site with everything grouped according to their relevance.
As can be seen from the above points, it is most important to implement a sitemap for all website projects with a considerable size. By using a sitemap and the above points when designing your sitemap, you will be able to keep your website easily accesible and neatly organized for everyone. Thus hopefully ensuring that your visitors will return to your site frequently.
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