A sitemap is a simple index which holds information together with other details of the pages on a website. In addition, the sitemap contains the content of the web pages.

Sitemaps SEO benefits

Types of sitemaps

In website design, there are two primary types of sitemaps:

• XML, and
• HTML

XML sitemaps have a particular structure. The end-user does not ever see these. These types of sitemaps are only used as a method of informing a search-engine of the following:

The content on a web page,

• How often the content of the website pages is updated, and
• The general importance of the pages in how they relate to each other.

An HTML sitemap is put together in such a way to be used by Internet users. They will use these maps to help them find the content that they are searching for. The sitemaps do not include all pages of a website. When a sitemap is instituted, it is vital to know that some formats cannot be submitted to Google’s Webmaster tools. Only a handful of supported formats can be submitted.

How a sitemap is used for SEO

For users of the Internet, a sitemap has the function of improving how a site can be navigated. At the same time, such a map makes the website more user-friendly – and helps with bumping up your SEO scores. With a sitemap, the theme of the website becomes more evident. This is because the website users will be able to see the sections of the site in addition to the links in one place. The map can be thought of as a skeleton that needs to be built on.

A sitemap is a vital component of any website

Even though creating a map for your website, from scratch,  will take some time, this process can be considered an investment in your SEO. Aside from it being very important – for your digital marketing – to have a website, take the time to optimise it in the best possible way that you can.

If the search engine spiders cannot crawl your site, it will not get indexed. This means that your website’s content will not get ranked in search engines results pages (SERPs). If this does not happen, it will probably not be visited by searchers.

Search engines will crawl a sitemap to select and pinpoint all information that is relevant to a particular search query that a user has inputted into the query bar. Within the directory, the pages are listed in a logical hierarchical order. The most appropriate pages will be placed at the top and the least relevant pages will be placed closer to the bottom.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

Are you keen to learn more about best practices for search engine optimisation? You should be as this will help you greatly in your digital marketing processes! To find out more, you should be checking out the Digital School of Marketing’s SEO and Web Analytics Course. For more information, please follow this link. Want to find out more information about this and our other online digital marketing courses? Visit our website!