The importance of sitemap submission for search engine optimisation cannot be over estimated. A sitemap is essentially a listing of all the pages on the website. Sitemap submission help search engines index the content quickly and more thoroughly. Googlebot and other search engine crawlers use this file to ascertain what data is on your website. There are a couple of instances when it’s particularly important to ensure a business has created and submitted a sitemap to Google.
- In the case of a new business, when there are few external links.
- The site has a large archive of files that are not naturally linked to each other.
- The site uses rich media content.
The sitemap will also help Google understand imagery and multimedia information on your site. Most CMS systems will allow you to create a Sitemap within the system. There are several ways to do it, with third party tools available to help. The outcome from a sitemap is an XML file that can be read by Google and other search engines.
Once the sitemap has been created, you need to submit it to Google for indexation.This file will alert Google anytime you make a change to your site, meaning it will get crawled more frequently than those sites without sitemaps. This means that you can force Google to crawl your website more frequently by forcing a crawl every time you upload a new sitemap.
However, caveat emptor, as we saw a case recently where someone had forced a crawl but the crawl resulted in lots of errors on their webmasters account as they hadn’t correctly marked up the site first.
