What is a Sitemap?

What is a Sitemap of the website?

A sitemap is a file providing information about the pages, videos and other files on your site and the relationships between them. It helps Google and other search engines crawl and map website. A sitemap tells the crawler which files you think are important in your site.  

It also provides valuable information about the files, for example –

  • Information about the pages.
  • When the page was last updated.
  • How often the page is changed.
  • Alternate language versions of a page.

Sitemaps are mainly used to improve the index process of your website by search engines, they can be used to provide accessibility to certain pages as well. It does not affect the normal way crawler bots index your page – it just extends the visibility and accessibility of your content.

Search engines like Google always try to display the most relevant results  to people for any given search query. In order do this effectively, they use site crawlers to read, organize and index information on the Internet.

XML sitemaps make it easier for search engine crawlers to read the content on your site and index the pages accordingly. As a result, this increases chances of improving the SEO ranking of the website.

Submitting a sitemap is very critical in SEO rank of your website. Click to know: How to submit sitemap for the website so that it be indexed by Google and other search engines in an intelligent manner.

Do remember to share your feedback in the comment section. Please refer to sitemaps.org for further updates.