Wwhat does a sitemap do and what is its use?
You have two types of sitemaps:
- for visitors
- for search engines such as Google.
The sitemap for visitors is an overview page with all the links on the website that are important to the visitor. The search engine sitemap works differently.
The purpose of a sitemap for search engines is to offer all your pages as clearly as possible to search engines such as Google and Bing. This is important if the website is indexed.
Google and other search engines attach great importance to a search engine. The website will not rank higher in Google, but it usually contributes to easy and fast indexing of a website. Also, more pages will often be indexed by search engines.
There are several ways to avoid having to create and maintain a sitemap yourself plugins available.
For WordPress these are free to use plugins such as Google XML Sitemaps or as part of the plugin SEO by Yoast.
This plugin ensures that new pages are automatically added to the sitemap and keeping it up to date is therefore automatic. However, it must be set in advance which pages should be indexed and how often.
It is true that a sitemap is only useful for websites with many pages and/or blog posts.
The fact is, Google likes a sitemap and that's usually a good reason for website owners to do it.
