The top priority for any business website is ease of navigation, and one of the best ways to ensure that website visitors can find what they are looking for is to include a sitemap. However, sitemaps can also offer SEO benefits. Continue reading for an introduction to the value of sitemaps for business websites.
XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is not something your website visitors can see—but it is something that search engine web crawlers can read. While ensuring that your website’s pages are easy to navigate through links and menus is still important, including a sitemap can make it even easier for search engines to understand your website and crawl all of its pages. In addition, sitemaps provide search engines with important metadata about your site, and having an up-to-date sitemap can ensure that search engines crawl and index new or updated pages on your website as soon as possible. This means that your pages will be more likely to show up in relevant searches, helping to boost your site’s visibility and success. Once you have created your sitemap and added it to your website, be sure to submit it to Google’s Search Console.
HTML Sitemaps
While XML sitemaps help search engine crawlers understand your website, HTML sitemaps help human visitors navigate your site and find the information they are looking for. This type of sitemap is typically a dedicated page of your website which lists all of the content you have published. This allows visitors to see all of the different pages they can visit in a single place. If you have a blog, website visitors will be able to see the full list of published posts on your sitemap, allowing them to quickly scroll through and click to the different blogs they wish to read. Keep in mind that an HTML sitemap is not a replacement for an XML sitemap—rather, they are different tools that are both valuable for improving your website and making it easier for web users to find your content.
Once your sitemaps are in place, it’s essential to keep your website up-to-date with high-quality, informative web content—and Pennington Creative can help. We offer a range of content creation services for small businesses as well as content packages for marketing agencies and their clients. Get in touch with us today to find out more about what we can do for your business.
