Sitemaps are the best way to inform search engines the presence of pages on your website. They are designed so the robot does not have to crawl your website for links itself, instead it can utilise the contents of the sitemap file so it instantly knows about any page of your website contained within the file. The robot will still index your site anyway, but the sitemap ensures it can do this more quickly and effectively.

There are 2 main types of sitemap. HTML sitemap and XML sitemap:

A HTML sitemap is the one that your visitors can use if they want to quickly find a specific page on your website, or if they simply get lost in a complicated site structure. Generally a HTML sitemap will contain simple text links to important pages on the website, such as the homepage, a contact page, terms and conditions, etc. Some automatically generated sitemaps also include useful description information too, so visitors can choose if the page is right for their needs before visiting it.

An XML sitemap is the one that the search engines use. It’s in a search engine friendly format, but not a user friendly format, and any user attempting to view it will be greeted by XML code they likely cannot understand. Search engines however, love XML code because it is specific to their needs and doesn’t contain non-relevant information. There are lots of ways to generate an XML sitemap, simply do a search for “sitemap generator”. Most of these will also generate the HTML sitemap for you, but you may want to make one yourself using your websites template rather than a generic one.

There are also less common sitemap files you can come across occasionally, and this is the RSS sitemap. Normally an RSS feed is used for site updates such as news posts, blogs, or forum posts. In instances where the site does not have any of these, an RSS sitemap can be generated instead and linked in the website header. This allows users to find out about new pages or changed content quickly, just as they would with a regular RSS feed.

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