Every blog or website needs a sitemap so that the search engines can find your web pages. Navigation on your web pages is also important, of course but today I discovered a tactic used by a competitor of one of my SEO clients that reminded me of the role of sitemaps. My client was getting really upset because his site had fallen down in the SERPs results for his search term. His business is in the service sector so the search phrases are geographic. His web pages have nice search engine friendly titles, of course. This means they describe the page content – for example this page could be named website-sitema

ps.html and that would indicate the subject matter. I had analysed his competitor’s site for keywords and phrases and there was nothing radical going on. The site navigation was on dropdown boxes – nothing special there, either. But when I looked at the sitemap I found that there was a separate page for each district and village where the company wanted to rank. They were not apparent on the navbar, but they were being fed to the search engines and the website was ranking high for all the districts where they operate.

So the sitemap is crucial. If you are using WordPress, all you need to do is get the free Google Sitemaps plugin, install it and forget about it. It is almost as easy to get a free sitemap for regular (HTML) websites as well, thanks to Sitemap Builder. Just visit the site, enter your site URL, check the pages that Sitemap builder finds and click if you are happy. A Google-compliant sitemap will be generated. All you need to do is paste the content into a new sitemap.xml page on your cpanel and it will be there to tell the search engines about your website content. If you have registered your website with Google Webmaster Tools you can check that the status of your sitemap is OK.