Determining if Your Website NEEDS a Sitemap

published by Dan in SEO Tools with No Comments

Last month I discussed several misconceptions about sitemaps. Hopefully I was able to clarify just important and useful sitemaps are. However if you are convinced that your website will not really benefit from a sitemap you might want to think again. Though I do agree that some websites (static single page sites) do not need a sitemap at all chances are that your website WILL benefit from it. Of course, sitemaps are NOT always essential but since they can only do good or no good but never do anything bad for your website’s “crawlability” then it is better to be on the safe side and just create one. However, if your website has one of the following features listed below then a sitemap IS essential for all your website content to be crawled by a spider.

1. Your site menu is flash or pure javascript (most rollover scripts are OK if they use ‘<a href’ links).
2. Your menu structure is more than 3 levels deep.
3. Some of your content is not getting indexed and it is publicly readable i.e. not behind a fire wall, login isn’t required, etc.
4. You want to provide some ‘Spider Bait’ i.e. optimized link text.

Some good sitemap generators include the Google Sitemap Generator and any of the other online sitemap generators listed in Google Webmaster Central.

Source: Search Engine Friendly Site Map by Dylan Downhill

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