What Is A Sitemap & Why You Need One

Before we get too far into why it might be important to design and maintain a sitemap, let’s define the term.

A sitemap is essentially a “map” of your website’s content. You can design it both physically by hand before creating your website and digitally in the structure afterwards.

You can physically draw and map your desired content and where it should be on your page. It can assist you in specifying which tabs the content should be located under as well as which categories you want to have, among other things. It can provide you with a useful overview of your content before you launch it.

A sitemap, in the digital sense, serves as a guideline and overview to help users navigate your website more easily. There are often more landing pages than can fit in the menu bar, they can be placed in a sitemap at the bottom of your website, where the user can still easily click.

Furthermore, it influences your site’s “SEO value” and aids Google in indexing and crawling your content. Because technical SEO optimization, among other things, deals with your structure, it is best if your SEO pages are no more than 3-4 links out. A sitemap is useful in this situation because it can be found at the bottom of all pages.