If you don’t have a sitemap yet here are few reasons to build one

I was talking about proper link architecture and its advantages in a previous article. One of these advantages was improve indexing by search engines. We all want our websites fully indexed by search engines. Sometimes, because of bad linking architecture, some of our pages remain unknown to users.

A simple but effective technique to also improve the indexing process of your website is to have a sitemap. You have to know that Google doesn’t guarantee that all of your pages will be indexed just because you create a sitemap.

For those that don’t know what a sitemap is here is a simple explanation: an xml or html or php or asp file that contains a list of your pages under the form of clickable text links. If your website is built on a CMS or a blog you can have a plugin that will generate the sitemap for you each time you add new content.

After you have the sitemap created you have two choices to present it to search engines:

1. You can place a static text link on the main page to it
2. In case of Google you can create an account with Google Webmaster Tools and submit your sitemap there

Either way it’s fine but the first method assures that other search engines will also be able to read your sitemap. So, in conclusion, a sitemap will improve the indexing of your pages by search engines. For small websites that manage to have all their pages linked from the main page of the website you don’t need a sitemap. Search engines will index your content with no problems. Sitemaps are useful when the link architecture is more complex and the site has depth.

Do you have a sitemap for your website? Do you think you should have a website regardless of your website dimensions? Let me know in comments bellow.