What is Sitemap? Importance of Sitemap in SEO

What is SiteMap?

Sitemaps are files that inform search engines about the pages on a website that are available for indexing. These files are essentially a list of URLs that contain additional information about the pages, such as the last time they were modified.

Types of Sitemap

Sitemaps are divided into two categories. While they serve different objectives, they are both encouraged and will not harm your website.

(1) XML Sitemap: The most popular sort of sitemap is an XML Sitemap. It can only be comprehended by search engines, hence it is dedicated solely to them. XML sitemaps are usually found in the domain’s root folder. For instance, www.example.com/sitemap.xml

An XML sitemap can have a maximum of 50,000 URLs and a file size of 50MB uncompressed. You’ll need to distribute your URLs among many XML sitemaps if you go above either restriction. After that, the sitemaps can be merged into a single XML sitemap index file. All other sitemaps are linked to your sitemap index.

For example, your sitemap index could have various sitemaps, such as a Blog Sitemap, a Product Sitemap, a Category Sitemap, and a Landing Pages Sitemap. Your image and video sitemaps can also be included.

(2) HTML Sitemap: The HTML sitemap is the second primary type. It can be viewed by website users and can assist them in navigating to a certain page, making it more useful from a user experience standpoint. In most cases, HTML sitemaps are linked in the footer of a website.

Aside from these two basic sitemaps, there are three further sorts of sitemaps to consider:

Video Sitemap: Designed to assist search engines in better understanding your website’s video content.

News Sitemap: This sitemap is used to help search engines identify material on websites that have been approved for Google News. Include URLs of stories written within the recent two days for the best results.

Image Sitemap: This is used to assist search engines find all of the images on your website.

How to Submit an SEO-Friendly Sitemap

A sitemap can be uploaded in under 20 minutes:

• Using software like Screaming Frog, make a URL list.
• If you haven’t previously, verify your site’s ownership with Google.
• Finally, use Google Search Console to submit your sitemap.

Do Sitemaps Help With SEO?

Technically, a sitemap isn’t required. Even if your site goes live without one, you’ll almost certainly see some traffic. Consider the case when your website only has one page, the ‘home page.’ In that instance, submitting a sitemap to aid in the finding of URLs on your website would be pointless – after all, there is only one.

Instead, concentrate on getting other websites and social media to link to your page. You might also use Google Search Console to register your domain. The latter is a Google-provided free service that lets website owners to improve their websites’ visibility.

By the way, even if you choose to submit a sitemap, we strongly advise you to use this service. It’ll make your life much easier, and you can use it to submit your sitemap to Google as well.

SEO: Why Sitemaps Are a Necessity

The method of getting your website to rank higher in search engine results is known as SEO. Keyword optimization, content marketing, link building, and site architectural optimization are some of the tactics that can be used to accomplish this. The list might go on forever. What matters is that a well-coordinated set of SEO tactics improves your chances of ranking for specific keywords.

Although your sitemap may indicate to search engines which pages on your site are the most significant, you must still provide meaningful, search engine optimised content and include relevant keywords in the page’s title and headers, among other things. While having an up-to-date sitemap is extremely beneficial and essential for excellent SEO strategies, it cannot be relied upon alone.

Why Do We Recommend Submitting a Sitemap?

Having a sitemap is beneficial. From an SEO sense, it is unquestionably worthwhile. A sitemap will make it easy to explore and crawl your site, especially if you have a large site with numerous pages and rich media content.

Your sitemap must be updated on a regular basis to guarantee that search engines are indexing the most recent version of your site. It makes it easier to find new pages and ensures that newly added or modified information gets crawled as quickly as feasible. You should always upload a sitemap whenever you build a new website or update an existing one.

Conclusion

Both HTML and XML have a lot of advantages and a few drawbacks in comparison. In conclusion, sitemaps won’t suddenly increase traffic or improve your organic search ranking, but they can help improve the user experience and crawlability of your website when used in conjunction with other SEO tactics. As a result, your website’s ranking will improve over time!

If you enjoyed this article, learn more about search engine optimization by reading our guide to the ‘ Google Search Console and its popular features ‘ and ‘Google Analytics and its Important Features‘.