Sitemaps play an important role in the Search Engine optimization. Why & How? All this I will be discussing here.
Understanding Sitemaps
According to Google.com
A Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.
Sitemaps.org defines it as
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.
So, Sitemaps is a name give to a URL map of a website which lists all the web pages URLs linked in the website with the necessary meta information required by the search engines to discover a website.
Types of Sitemaps
Sitemaps are of two type, HTML Sitemaps which consists of the listing of the webpages present in a website XML Sitemaps consists the same information hierarchically but in a more organized order. Below you can see the difference in the content of HTML & XML Sitemaps of Inforids.com
HTML Sitemap of Inforids.com (Click to Enlarge)
XML Sitemap of Inforids.com (Click to Enlarge)
XML Sitemaps are most common in use today.
Why Sitemaps?
Sitemaps are helpful for site to catch
- Dynamic content
- Discovering pages by Searchbots during the crawl process
- New meta data and has new links
- Large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.
Sitemaps informs search engines about the
- How often the pages on your site change.
- The date each page was last modified.
- The relative importance of pages on your site.
Nice info here.. I’ll keep an eye on your next post.. Keep it up. You are helping me. and yes, site maps is the best way to get indexed by google in 24 hrs. google webmaster + sitemap = blogger must have
Thanks, We are going to present a complete package Search Engine Optimization(SEO) Guide for webmasters & bloggers in this section, binded under the Complete Bloggers Guide to SEO. So, keep in touched.