What is a sitemap & How does it work?

A sitemap is a list of web pages or flow chart diagrams that shows the connections between web pages within a domain. A sitemap file acts as a roadmap to help search engines like Bing, Google, Yahoo find, and crawl and index all of your website’s content, and tell search engines what content is available and how to reach it.

There are four main types of sitemaps:

1. XML Sitemap: is a sitemap that help search engine as Google can find, crawl, and understand your website structure and contents.
2. Video Sitemap: is a sitemap specifically to help Google understand video content host on your pages.
3. News Sitemap: provide the search engine Google with metadata regarding the specific news content on a website. Using the News Sitemap, Google News can quickly find the news articles contained on a site
4. Image Sitemap: sitemap for images, which help Google search engine to scan and index images and find all of the images hosted on your site.

Why sitemap is so important?

Search engines like Bing, Google, and Yahoo use your sitemap to find different pages on your site. XML sitemaps help search engines to crawl and discover the content of your web pages on your website. These sitemaps give search engines a website’s URLs and offer data a complete map of all pages on a site. This helps search engines prioritize pages that they will crawl.

XML Sitemaps are important for Search Engine Optimization (See how SEO work) because sitemap make it easier for search engine to find your web pages content efficiently. Structure your website correctly with a valuable information that will help search engine to quickly, easily find the content within the website. This is important because Google ranks web page not just website.

Content edited by Silk Media Web Services