Many web designers and developers out there know just how important it is to have a visual sitemap for their web development project, but many newbie website owners do not. After all, it’s one more step to a web design project and you’re already overwhelmed, right? Well, the truth of the matter is that creating sitemaps with a visual sitemap generator will not only make your life much easier, it will help to ensure that your website is performing perfectly, to the best of its ability.

In order to have a rock solid website you will need to make sure that it is one that meets the highest standards, incorporating a variety of features that will promote ease of use and stellar usability to keep your visitors on the page. Top quality content and aesthetics will keep your visitors coming back again and again, helping you quickly rise to the top and surpass your competitors.

While you can create all of the above manually, a visual sitemap generator will make sure that all of your efforts are on point. Utilizing a visual sitemap generator to create sitemaps for your website will help you with any and all advanced planning. It’s what will help to ensure that your website stands out from the crowd, yes, but it will also make sure that your site is seen by visitors and search engines as practically flawless. When you create sitemaps with a visual sitemap generator you will have the ability to learn so much about your website: what works, what doesn’t and what needs to go.

A sitemap is essentially a page or pages that function as a directory of your website, listing all of the links to all documents and files that are found on your site. These are random listings of links, either. A sitemap is highly organized in such a way that provides website users with an idea of how all of the information can be found on the website, kind of like a table of contents or treasure map, even. Visual sitemaps are considered to be a concept map of your website’s content and XML and HTML sitemaps are what helps visitors and search bots find what they are looking for. A visual sitemap generator can create multiple sitemaps in minutes, allowing you to focus on what matters most—marketing and growing your business.

Five main reasons that you should use a visual sitemap generator

Discovery – a visual sitemap generator like DYNO Mapper offers Google Analytics Integration with their software in an effort to streamline the discovery of your website, even through the planning phase of your next website. Google Analytics is a free tool that you can track information about the way your website visitors interact with your website, which is imperative to any successful SEO campaign.

Planning – a visual sitemap generator will make the website planning stage an over efficient breeze, allowing you to see what will work, what won’t and what you will need to improve on before you go to launch.

Communication with Team Members and Clients – DYNO Mapper, for instance, is a visual sitemap generator that makes collaboration a simplified process, allowing users to send and receive feedback throughout their web development process. The software offers a slew of collaboration features, including the comment feature which allows public or private users to comment on a page by page basis, and in an organized fashion. Users also have the opportunity to search and filter comments by keyword.

SEO Efforts – Unlike a visual sitemap, an XML sitemap is created with search engines and SEO in mind. XML sitemaps are utilised by search engine spiders to speed up the indexing of your website’s pages so they can be available in the SERP (search engine results page). The more information you can give search engines the better. You can even include information about the priority of each page and the frequency that they are updated so search engines know when to come back to check for new information to index.

Stellar Usability – after creating an HTML sitemap with a visual sitemap generator you will have the ability to perform a content inventory and audit of your website, allowing you to look at your website from a completely different angle. A content inventory with a visual sitemap generator like DYNO Mapper will go through all of the content on your website including all text, images, documents and applications, and access them. Doing this will help you gain a true understanding of what content is in the proper location and up to date, and what’s not—thus promoting perfect usability and a flawless user-experience.

DYNO Mapper – Visual Sitemap Generator from DYNO Mapper – Sitemap Generator on Vimeo.

If you decide to take advantage of a visual sitemap generator like DYNO Mapper to create sitemaps during your redesign or web design project you will have the ability to take advantage of a slew of other features including keyword tracking, content inventory and auditing, Google Analytics integration and more. If you’d like to try out a DYNO Mapper for your next project, be sure to sign up for our fully-functional free trial..