ARTICLES FOR WEBMASTERS 
 Importance of Sitemaps
Presence of a sitemap will help index your web pages faster, and rank
them better. With a sitemap, you needn't submit each of your individual
pages to search engines separately. In this article we will see the
importance of sitemaps, and how you can add a sitemap to a blog.
Normally, Google bots crawl and index all pages on a website
automatically. However, these bots can always miss some pages. The
missed pages are usually standalone, without incoming links from other
pages. You can find out which of your pages are actually indexed by
Google with this search query: "site:the URL" (please notice there is
no space next to the colon). This query will list all the pages indexed
within the URL.
Importance of Sitemaps
New blogs may not get any considerable increase in traffic, even if
their posts are regular. The cause may be that only the home page of
the blog is indexed, and individual pages just escaped the index. Due
to this, these blogs won't get any traffic these individual pages can
bring.
Dynamically updated websites should definitely have a sitemap. Search
bots access newer pages for indexing through links from the already
existing pages, while the indexing is happening. If any of your
internal pages is standalone, it may not get indexed at all. A sitemap
can help get these standalone pages indexed.
Another reason behind sitemaps is that the search bots find it
difficult to crawl pages whose navigation is built using JavaScript or
AJAX. Search bots are built to crawl only text links. So, by submitting
a sitemap, you will make crawling and indexing of your pages easier for
search engines.
Effect on Traffic and Search Engine Optimization
Lack of sitemap will not cause your site to rank lower for its
optimized keywords. Without a sitemap, all indexed pages within your
site will rank just as it would with a sitemap.
However, sitemap will greatly increase traffic of a site, merely due to
the fact that the newer pages will be indexed far faster and show up in
search queries. Also, any unindexed pages within the site will be
indexed by search engines, driving traffic to those pages. The effect
will be a big boom in traffic.
A blogger adds content to his site to get a steady traffic growth. Hard
working bloggers may add hundreds of posts to their blogs in a year. If
a hundred of these pages are not indexed by search engines, imagine the
loss of traffic. He can get all those pages to the search index, by
adding a sitemap.
Adding a Sitemap to Blogs
You can create a sitemap with an online sitemap builder and add it to
your blog. These sitemap builders crawl a website through internal
links and enlist all internal pages into an XML file.
Besides XML, you can also use HTML sitemaps, which was the traditional
sitemap format. The advantage of HTML is that, you can use it with both
search bots and human visitors, while XML sitemaps contain pure XML
source code, which a human being may not understand. HTML sitemap is
nothing but a directory page within your website, which links to all
the internal pages arranged by categories.
Once the sitemap is ready, upload it to your web host and link to it
from your Google Webmaster Tools interface.
If you don't already have an account on Google Webmaster Tools,
sign up and verify your blog. It provides two means for verification:
Meta tag authentication and HTML file upload. Verified webmasters can
add sitemap for their blogs by following the instructions given.
You can build sitemaps online with one of these websites:
Offline Sitemap Builders
If you are using an offline sitemap builder, you shouldn't run it when
you are logged into the site. Offline sitemap builders, run from your
own system, can get access to your blog hosting account if you run it
when you are logged in. It means, the comment deletion and post
deletion links will be accessible to the program, which will index
them. This will cause your important posts and comments getting deleted
automatically.
Adding Sitemap to Blogger Blogs
Within Blogger blogs, you cannot upload an XML sitemap. There is no
file upload feature within Blogger, unless you use self-hosted blogs.
There is a good alternative to this for Blogger platform. You can use
your blog's RSS or Atom feed as sitemap. Follow these guidelines to add
the feed sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.
- Access Google Webmaster Tools with your Google account.
- Within your website profile, click Add below Sitemap.
- Choose the sitemap type as General Web Sitemap.
- In the text field, complete the blog feed URL. For this, you only need to add "feeds/posts/default".
- If you are using feed syndication services like FeedBurner and have set it as the default feed in the blog's feed setting, then use "feed/posts/default?rss" instead of "feeds/posts/default".
The sitemap, once added, needs to be approved by Google before it will
have an effect. Once approved, Google will periodically access the
sitemap to index any unindexed pages within the site. This way, all
newer pages are guaranteed to be in the Google index.
Conclusion
Importance of the sitemap in traffic of a website shouldn't be
underestimated. Professional websites even provide a link to their
sitemap on the home page. It can be also a great alternative for users
to navigate the site.
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