Discover Why Sitemaps Are an Integral Part of Good Web Design

The term sitemap refers to a page on a website that collates links to every page on the site in order to make pages as easy to find, for both users and search engine crawlers, as possible. Typically these links will be grouped together and organized in a manner that represents the structure of the website and they can provide a variety of benefits to the owner of the site. This article aims to look at why it is important to utilise sitemaps when creating a website for both visitor usability and search engine optimization reasons.

Two different forms of sitemap are common (HTML and XML), and both are important to include for different reasons. HTML sitemaps can be viewed as being for the benefit of human visitors; they offer the user a single webpage from which they are able to navigate to any other place on the website with a single click. A well designed sitemap that organises all of the links into easy to navigate sections will greatly improve the user’s experience thus increasing the likelihood of the visitor to return to the website in the future.

XML sitemaps on the other hand are for the benefit of search engines. Search engine bots crawl websites by following links from one page to another and for large and sprawling websites it can be all too easy for a link to be missed and a page left orphaned. Uploading a sitemap provides an easy way to ensure that the search engines are aware of every single page on a particular site.


XML sitemaps are of particular importance to websites that have a large quantity of dynamic (for example flash) content. Although most of the search engines are greatly improving with regards to crawling dynamic sites providing them with a sitemap is a way to be certain that every page is found rather than just hoping that the bots will be successful on their own.

Sitemaps also provide a quick way to let the search engines know when the content on a site has been updated. Although this in itself will not ensure that the entire website is crawled straight it is typical for search engines to send crawlers out more regularly to sites that they know are updating content regularly and sitemaps provide them with this information.

In conclusion, sitemaps can be a great tool in both ensuring visitors find the site simple and intuitive as well as a method of making sure that search engine bots crawl every page of a site. While a good sitemap alone will not make up for a poorly designed and difficult to navigate website the benefits outlined above can go a long way in helping new sites (that have fewer links pointing to them) and dynamic sites (that some search engine crawlers can struggle with) advance.