One of the key components to a successful website is in making sure search engines can clearly digest all of the web pages on the website to show on their search engines for related queries. There are many ways you can increase the exposure your website has to search engines, and increase the rank of the result on search engines too. One of the most important elements to a website for SEO is in having a sitemap and making sure search engines can see it: especially Google. However, what does a sitemap do and why is it vital to a website to have one? Here are the main reasons.

#1 It Helps Search Engines Rank Your Website

An important part to getting your website ranked by search engines is making sure, to begin with, that the search engines can see the pages on your website. If you think about it, how would search engines know when you have published new content without a sitemap?

Since a sitemap contains links to every article and page on your website, it is an extremely useful tool that search engines use to:

1. Process all the pages for search engine results
2. Accurately determine the search engine ranking for the website
3. Since the sitemap is live (that is, it updates as you publish new web pages on your website), search engines can use it to determine when you have published new content/pages.

#2 Helps Websites with Poor Structuring

Depending on the type of website you have will depend on how you have structured your website’s content. For example, if you are a blog about fashion, you may have a structuring for Men/Womens clothing and then Shirts/Trousers/Shoes/Dresses/Suits and so on…

The problem is that some websites tend to have a poor structure since the content can seem very different to each other so it is hard to structure it. With this, sitemaps work very well in structuring your content for search engines to determine the content better.

#3 Poorly Linked Articles

It is true that there are many ways that Google and other search engines can pick up on articles that are published. For example, if you have an article that is getting lots of organic traffic that links to a new article, such as with a ping back, then the search engines will process that article from being linked to the high traffic first article.

The problem arises when you have many articles that are not linked to one another and do not have any links going to it either – how would search engines pick up that the article exists?

Sitemaps will always contain links to every article on your website. With this, even if you have extremely poor linking, outbound and inbound linking, then you will at least know that with a sitemap you will still get processed and crawled by Google.

However, what you should really do is fix the linking problem in your articles and make sure your web pages contain a few internal links to other relevant web pages on your website!