The importance of sitemaps in search engine optimisation is many times underestimated. The word sitemap is self explanatory. It refers to a map of your website guiding the visitor or the search engines where to find the information they are looking for. They make your site more user and search engine friendly.


Often SEO Company focuses on having a site map for your website. Sitemap unlike robots.txt file shows search engines the way to the website pages more important for the search engines. The concept of sitemaps is not new but the use of sitemaps for improving website ranking is definitely new but not difficult.

Sitemaps for Google are quite different from the conventional sitemaps for human because Google uses XML format while the one for the human visitors is made using HTML coding. This clearly means that to use them for website promotion it is important to have two different types of them one for search engines and the other for human visitor.

Now you might be confused won’t two sitemaps lead to duplicity issue? Leave your worries behind because the answer is NO it will not lead to duplicate pages. Google clearly states in its introduction to sitemaps that two different sitemaps for Google and visitors will not be penalized.

Sitemaps have a greater purpose apart from being the navigational tool to your site. Whenever you add new content to your site it is the sitemap which can be used to let Google know about it. This does not mean that since you have a sitemap Google will come rushing to you for the new content but yes the process can be accelerated. One more advantage of sitemaps is it helps in content bifurcation and gives you chance to figure out if anything is missing or what more needs to be added to the content.