A sitemap is a page of links, images, and files from a website. This list of links include some information about the pages they link to. Sitemaps allow search engine bots to crawl through your website more easily, which makes them easier to find when Googled.
There are three main types of sitemaps that Google supports, which are XML (similar to HTML sitemap, which is for user navigation, and the status quo for sitemaps because you can store more information with it), Text (made up of URLs and more limiting than XML), and RSS (made up of blog page feeds, similar to Text because it only shows URLs). There are also sitemap extensions that Google supports too, such as Video (for videos that are time sensitive or hard to find on your website), Image (gives you more control over what Google displays about your images), and News (for time sensitive content or items you want to be featured on Google News).
Sitemaps should be used for large, new, or media rich websites to make their information easier to find. To read more in-depth about this topic, visit What is a Sitemap & How To Create One for SEO (klientboost.com)
4 Responses
Great explanation of sitemaps. I still find it hard to understand sometimes, but this brought a lot of clarity to that idea!
Thank you for your explanation! I really appreciate your discussion of extensions as well. There is a plethora of helpful tools for marketers in this category that go largely unnoticed by beginners.
I have always somewhat known what a sitemap is but this explanation really helped me!
This explanation totally helped me understand sitemaps a little bit better! They still confuse me, but I now understand a little bit behind some of the purposes for them, such as search engines using them to get more information about the website’s content, messages, and themes.