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Are you optimizing your website for search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN? You may have applied many tips and tricks but one of those, the importance of which is sometimes underestimated is sitemaps. Sitemaps are just a map of your site – i.e. on one single page you are revealing the site structure, its sections, the links between them, etc.

Sitemaps make navigating your site easier and having an updated sitemap on your site is good for your users and especially for search engines. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines. While in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your sitemap you tell search engines where you’d like them to go.

If you want to generate sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view, you can not go on with the conventional sitemap only. For instance, Google uses a XML format sitemap that is different from the ordinary html sitemap generated for human visitors.

Why create special Sitemap?

1. Sitemaps offer an opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any or frequent changes on your website.
2. You rely less on external links that will bring search engine spider to your site when you have a sitemap to submit it for the search engines.
3. Sitemaps help in detecting any broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other way.
4. If your site is new or if you have a significant number of new or updated pages, then using a sitemap can be vital to your success.

So, using a sitemap might not generate huge advantages right away but as search engines improve their sitemap indexing algorithms, it is expected that more and more sites will be indexed fast via sitemaps.

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