What is Sitemap? Why and How to add a Sitemap to your Blog or Website?
5 March 2008
9 CommentsWhat is a Sitemap?
A Sitemap is a well structure and an organized model of a Web site’s content that allows the users to navigate through the site to find the information they are looking for, just as a traditional geographical map helps people find places they are looking for in the real world. Thus, a sitemap is a hierarchical visual model of all the pages of a Web site.
In general, there are two types of sitemaps. The first type of sitemap is a HTML page listing the pages of your site - often by section - and is meant to help users find the information they need. The second type of sitemap is an XML document.
According to Google Support,
XML Sitemaps - usually called Sitemaps are a way for you to give Google information about your site. In its simplest terms, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.
The first type of sitemap, i.e. HTML sitemap can be added as a page to your blog or website and can be used by your visitors to see the structure and organization of your blog or website and to help them easily navigate through the various categorized posts and pages.
The second type of sitemap, i.e XML sitemap can be submitted to search engines like Google and thus are for search engines to see.
Why Should You Have a Sitemap?
Creating and submitting a Sitemap (Google Sitemap) helps make sure that a search engine gets to know about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may have been left out in the normal crawling process! Sitemaps are extremely useful to submit when your website has dynamic content as in a regularly updated blog or a website with lots of AJAX or Flash.
A Google sitemap can contain a list of URL’s (or even a list of sitemaps!) and to be exact, up to 50,000 URL’s! This means you can potentially expose a large number of URL’s from your site to Google. Though it is not necessary that all of those pages in the sitemap will be indexed but most of them are! and this increases your chance to get a place in search results and also helps you build some traffic for your blog.
Adding a Google Sitemap also helps Google Webmaster Tools also helps you to see the stats about your site like how many pages are getting indexed and internal and external linking and thus serve the purpose of an analytical tool.
How to add a Sitemap to your Blog?
We already discussed in brief about the two types of sitemaps and I have already cleared the purpose of each of them. A quick recap: The HTML sitemaps are for the human eyes, while the XML sitemaps are for the Search Engines.
If you run an eye over the navigation bar at the top, you’ll see a page called Sitemap. That is my HTML sitemap actually and it lets you view my posts categorized easily and thus increases the readability and usability of my blog. Similarly, I also have an XML sitemap made for Inspirit that I have submitted to Google Webmaster Tools.
It is very easy to generate and add a sitemap to your blog. XML sitemaps and HTML sitemaps can easily be generated by using many free sitemap generators available online. Doing a Google search for free sitemap generators can be really helpful.
And, Who said Life is not a Bed of Roses? It indeed is a bed of roses, for WordPress users. Here are two awesome (must-have) WordPress plugins that will automatically publish and update the sitemaps for you and will keep the search engines as well as the human eyes happy. One is Google Sitemap Generator and the other is Dagon Design Sitemap Generator.
Download the plugins by following the links provided above (and follow the installation and usage instructions provided along with them). Extract the contents of the .zip in the plugins directory of your WordPress install and then activate them from the plugins section of the dashboard. After you have activated the plugins from the dashboard, you can configure them to suit your needs from the Options page.
I was quite unaware of the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator until I came across this discussion at Authority Blogger forums. In fact, the Sitemap Page you see on the top is made using this plugin, without which I couldn’t have gathered my stuff together in a lifetime! And XML sitemap for Inspirit, that I have submitted to Google is generated from Google Sitemap Generator.
All you have to do after a one time effort is to sit back and relax, and keep updating your blog. Your sitemaps will get updated every time you make any changes to your blog. This will accelerate the indexing of the pages from your blog in a great way and you’ll notice a measurable difference in search engine traffic and page views per visit, almost immediately after installing these!
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I wish I understand about sitemap earlier
…important thing to attach to the blog 
Great explanation by the way, thanks!
thanks for the post. i hope to read some more.
Best regards from Sebbi
This whole sitemap debate is interesting. Many say it is a good and necessary thing to do. Others say it is not needed. I don’t know what to think.
What you write in this post makes a lot of sense. I can really see the advantage for the readers to be able to click the tab at the top of your blog and get an easy to read list of all your posts, indexed by category.
However, I really wonder about the XML sitemap. I already prevent Google from indexing many of the areas of my site. If my posts get indexed on the main blog, then I don’t think I want them indexed again in the categories, and then again in the rss, etc. etc.
When my site was new, I found all my posts indexed several times like this:
…/post
…/category/post
…/archives/post
…/rss/post
and so on.
I even found a few that had been indexed while in draft state which seemed to add another url. Sometimes a single post would show in search results 5 or 6 times with 5 or 6 different urls. Once I started using the robots.txt file to limit the Google bot to the main blog, this duplicate indexing stopped.
Maybe I am wrong, but it seems like my site climbed much higher in search results in the months after I did this.
-Will
Quite true, that search engines love original content and too many exact duplicates of the same thing but with different links will affect your rank improvement.
I should have mentioned in the post that the basic use of sitemaps is to let search engines and humans to find a particular post in your blog easily. Even if having the same content lots of time on the search engines gave you more rank, would anyone like to read your blog when every different link pointed to the same content? Certainly, No.
So, its a good idea to include only the main post URL and chose from the archives or the categories instead of both. I recommend the use of categories though, for more specific search results.
Apart from using the robots.txt , you can prevent the Google spiders from indexing the same content many times by excluding the areas you don’t want to be indexed from the plugin options which are really helpful.
Thanks for the explanation–this is the first time I have really understood what a sitemap actually is! Great post! I really wish I had wordpress now…life is not such a bed of roses for those of us on Blogger. I just wrote a post today about how I have been thinking about switching, but the idea kind of intimidates me because I am new to blogging. I may just have to try it, though…
Anyway, thanks for the post!
Glad that I could help you
Moving to WordPress is a good option if you plan to go for a self hosted blog with your own domain. Otherwise, Blogger is a better option than the free WordPress dot com blogs if you consider the options for tweaking your template, etc.
Do not worry about being on blogger and not being able to generate sitemaps. You can use the various free sitemap generator tools which are easily available online. You can generate a sitemap in a few seconds after you have updated your blog. You can then submit the new sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools and have your latest posts indexed sooner!
Cheers
Hi Abhinav, Actually you can create a sitemap using blogger. I’ve made a post about it here.
http://silkenhut.com/how-to-add-a-blogspot-sitemap-in-google-webmaster-tools/
^_^
Allen’s last blog post..CommentLuv gives you backlinks, Feedburner Feedsmith steals them
Nice and helpful post there. Thanks, Allen.
Having a well designed sitemap can help you rank better in Google in case some important pages on your sites were not getting crawled by Google.