5 Reasons You Should Start Using Sitemaps In Your Blogs

1. Sitemaps are necessary for any and every website online. Before even starting your off page SEO you should consider about making your on page SEO 100%. No on page SEO is complete without a proper sitemap, either in HTML or XML file format. Sitemaps are of two types, one for search engines and one for your website visitors. As a usual practice webmasters go with XML file formats for search engines (bots) and HTML formats for human visitors.

2. You should not expect hoards of traffic and miracles to happen just by submitting a sitemap overnight. Sitemap may not help your website boost up in search ranking positions, but can help search engines discover your site better. They communicate to search engines on behalf of your website and get some good long tail traffic as a result of the discovery. Keeping sitemap updated every three months will boost that long term traffic significantly which is good on long term view for your website.

3. There are nifty wordpress plugins to help in one click sitemap generation. I have used both software programs to generate the XML sitemap file and free wordpress plugins like sitemap generator.

4. In case of HTML sitemaps a properly formatted archive page with html links to all your site pages may serve the purpose. But you should go with what suits your website. At any point if a visitor lands to your website via home page, the maximum posts or content he/she can see at one glance is going to be in the range of 10-15, related posts and category widgets in sidebar can help project more content, but to give what the visitor exactly needs, a search box for searching within the site and an archive page can help. An ideal website will have a search box and a link to archive page somewhere in the most visited parts of a website.

5. Also Google webmaster central is getting better and helpful for webmasters, with just a click of a button you can upload your sitemap and get it validated within hours to see how many pages are accepted by Google. Again if you are not using Google webmaster tools you are missing a major part of knowing on how your website performs in Google’s search. The more you use Google tools, the more you can get Google traffic, obviously the major part of internet search traffic. Concluding on this post, start harnessing the power of xml and html sitemaps and start inspire both your visitors and search engine bots.

This post was written by Jai who blogs about free printable coupons and helps shoppers save money using free coupons. He also writes about SEO in his personal internet marketing blog.