The Importance of a Sitemap

What Is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that help search engines find, crawl and index all of your website’s content. Sitemaps also tell search engines which pages on your site are most important.

To start off with the basics, a sitemap is a file that provides information about the pages, videos, images, and other files on your website. It’s important for various reasons, including:

• Acting as a roadmap for Google and other search engines to find and better understand your content.
• Leading search engines through your website to crawl and index the essential pages.
• Helping search identify when new pages and updates to old pages are available.
• Helping search engines find alternate language versions of your page.

But before I go further, you must know that there are two types of sitemap formats: HTML and XML. Here’s the basic difference:

HTML sitemaps: This is more like your content sitemap that users can see and use to navigate your site. They’re also commonly referred to as your “website archive.” Some marketers view HTML sitemaps as outdated or even entirely unnecessary.

XML sitemaps: This is the sitemap that’s purely used for indexing and crawling your website and is manually submitted. It’s the more modern form of handling how all your content is stored across your website.

Why are Sitemaps Important?

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing use your sitemap to find different pages on your site.