SEO Step By Step Guide– 52. Google Sitemaps

Most of the webmasters when they think of optimizing their website, they automatically think of making their website optimized for Google. This is probably because of the Google’s monopoly in the search industry. Google tries to keep its algorithm unique and has a number of search engine concepts that are unique their search engines. For example, pagerank is unique to Google. Similarly Google’s sitemap too is specific to Google.

In this post we will discuss about the importance of Google sitemap for getting good search ranking. If you want to invite the Google search bot frequently to your website, you must make sure to submit a Google Sitemap. Google Sitemap is different from the regular sitemap we have in our websites, an HTML page. Google sitemap is not for public viewing. It is meant for Google’s search bots. Google’s spiders try to get important information about your website through the sitemap. The sitemap that you present it to Google will help the spider to crawl and index your website completely. A regular crawl without the Google Sitemap will not guarantee any a complete indexing. A number of pages may not be accessed by the search bots for various reasons.

For example if you have an ecommerce website and if the products pages are accessible only through the site’s search feature then Google’s spider may not access these pages unless you have a way of telling the search bot about those pages. Here by having Google Sitemap, you can ensure that even the products pages that are reached via search feature too are indexed. It is important to have all the pages of your website indexed. Only the indexed pages will feature in the search results. So greater the number of indexed pages greater the chances of featuring in the search results.

Besides that Google Sitemap will tell Google how frequently your website will be updated. If your website is frequently updated then the latest updates may not reflect in the search results because Google will be listing your site as per the information it has in its cache. Your latest offers and promotions may not feature in the search results. Therefore, a Google map with the update frequency help your site up to date in the search engine’s database.

If you have just a 5 page website, then you will not appreciate the importance of Google sitemap. But there are websites with thousands of pages and it is imperative to have Google sitemaps for such websites failing which will put you in a very disadvantageous position.

Google sitemaps are XML files and they are not available for the visitors on your site. Currently, only Google is using this sitemap feature. However, Google shares a market share of 70% in the search industry therefore, it is highly important we gain visibility in Google to tap take advantage of Google’s online popularity.

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