It is a well known fact that Sitemaps are very helpful when you are trying to optimise your website as it allows the search engines to crawl through your website easily. However there is a new generation of sitemaps that has been found to be even more beneficial as they make it faster and more efficient for the search engines to crawl compared to the older sitemaps that were generated for users.

Google created the XML protocol due to companies adding more content and complexity to their sites and Google would sometimes 'skip' data as it crawled quickly through the pages. It is much easier for them to track all of the URL's from one place and it also shows when the website was last updated. This is important as Google decides ranking results based on relevancy and a site that is regularly updated is more likely to be relevant to the user's search query. If the search engines have to crawl your website through the menu's it will take much longer and there may be pages that aren't accessible through these menu's.

Our SEO projects include creating an XML Sitemap for your website to ensure that all of the pages on your website get indexed by the SE's. If you would like to learn more about the many factors that influence Search Engine Optimisation and how to improve your website's rankings, please see our SEO Training Courses.