Despite having little (or no) experience with web development, chances are you have heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization includes a wide range of techniques that can boost your website’s visibility in search engines. Keywords are a huge part of most SEO strategies – but there are many other crucial tasks to consider, too.
Creating a sitemap is one of the best things you can do to boost organic traffic. By including a site map, you make it easier for search engines to comprehend and index your content. It isn’t necessary to have any specialist knowledge to construct one; it can be done by anybody.
This post will explain in more depth what a sitemap is and what types of sitemaps are there.
Introducing Sitemaps
Did you ever wonder how Google determines which websites deserve ranking and how to find them? This is where Googlebot comes into play – a program that crawls the web and does two things in particular.
A Googlebot crawls the web, moving from page to page. In the process, it records information regarding its links and how they are related to each other. Using this data, Google makes search results and determines which searches a piece of content is relevant for.
Given Google’s enormous popularity and the importance of organic (search engine) traffic in general, it is crucial to work to increase this bot’s ability to understand your website. This is where sitemaps play a role.
Sitemaps (sometimes called XML sitemaps) are a file that can never be seen by people browsing your site. Your site’s pages are listed in a separate section marked for ‘search engines only’. This file may seem simple but it is a very important tool.
Sitemap’s Benefits
You don’t need to consider using a sitemap as Googlebot or any other search engine bots will be able to find and enroll your site on its own. However, there is a catch, enrollment doesn’t guarantee it all access to everything you want it to consider.
Here comes the sitemap in play. A sitemap will mollify the concern, by achieving two primary tasks, that are as follows:
- A sitemap is made up of all the pages that are available on your site which will make it sure for Googlebot to explore everything.
- Metadata or contextualizing information about each page is embraced in a sitemap. Making it easy for the bots as it tells about how pages are organised, categorized, and how they are related to each other. It also tells about the last updates made and so on.
Sitemaps are a necessity that helps Googlebot see all the content that one has to offer. It helps to understand the organization of the content.
Types Of Sitemaps
HTML and XLM are two types of sitemaps. As HTML sitemaps work as guide visitors XLM sitemaps help to guide search engine bolts and make sure that they find the site’s URL to enrol.
HTML Sitemap
Have you ever noticed the formatted links, at the bottom of a web page? Well, that’s HTML sitemaps. They are there to show the readers what’s on the site. They usually have a limited SEO value.
HTML sitemaps were very useful before the rise of header-based navigational rollovers. They used to offer bots shortcut links to pages, which used to pass authority resulting in boosting rankings.
Today, many HTML sitemaps without a doubt duplicate present links in the header or footer. But some websites nonetheless use HTML sitemaps for their most important navigation.
XLM Sitemap
XML records are machine-readable. XML sitemaps give search engines an efficient listing of your site’s URLs. The XML site map is a simple text content document marked up with tags that identify the kind of data. The URL of the XML sitemap is typically at the root of the domain provided for your bot to access.
The conclusion of the sitemap
Effective SEO isn’t just about using keywords on your website. You also need to give search engines like Google all the information they need to understand your content. Creating a sitemap is one of the easiest and best ways to do it. Listings on this page tell search engine crawlers everything they need to know about the pages and structure of your site.