An xml sitemap is a type of directory or roadmap of all the web links on your website. Just as a map shows the way, a sitemap also shows which content is available where and how to reach it. This is especially important from the search engines perspective. Search engines are Yahoo, Bing and Google. For example, if an individual were to navigate all the pages of your site, he/she would have to one by one click through all the pages to finally reach the last page. An xml sitemap on the other hand is one single list or lists of all pages of your site. This is especially useful in indexing. When submitted to Google, the many thousand pages and a deep website can be easily crawled using an xml sitemap. Including your pages in an xml sitemap simply means you consider them important landing pages. Search engines are however smart enough find the various pages of your site. Generally, site maps are of 4 types: News, Image, Video and Normal xml site map. As the name suggests, news site maps help Google find news for Google news page ranking. Likewise, for images and videos – Google understands all image content from the image pages and similarly for videos uploaded on your site.
So how does one create an xml sitemap? Answer: SEO sitemap generator. In case you are a word press user, the task just got easier. You can simply use a plugin (like Yoast SEO plugin or Google XML Sitemaps) to create your sitemap. This automatically keeps adding new pages to the xml map list. If you are not a word press user you can simply create a sitemap through other websites that will generate the map and given it to you. Once the xml site map is generated and everything looks alright you can submit it to Google. Sitemaps have a limit of 50,000 urls. In case you are exceeding this limit, Google suggests breaking them up into many different sitemaps. Site maps also have a size limit of 50 MB.
Benefits of xml sitemaps: XML sitemaps are extremely crucial from an SEO point of view. These sitemaps are useful for search engines to crawl your site thereby helping in ranking. Most recently added pages are updated, therefore search engines know they need to crawl your site again. XML sitemaps are also useful to you in finding site errors if any. They are an essential boost to SEO by helping in ranking and therefore reaching the end user and increasing the revenue and number of clients.
Types of sitemap in SEO: there are two major types of sitemaps: XML and HTML sitemaps. HTML maps are user centric. They help in guiding the end user to the various pages of the site. XML maps are for search engines to locate all the links and pages on your site.
Html sitemap in SEOare more useful to the users than search engines. Search engines prefer XML sitemaps. These are usually placed on the homepage and guide the user throughout the various important pages of the website. One of the key don’ts is submitting a page to Google for indexing by including it in the xml sitemap and but then it is blocked using robots.txt.
