Intro
Sitemap is the list of pages of a website accessible to the user or the search engine (crawlers). Generally a sitemap contains the list of the pages; however more details and information can be added. There are basically two popular formats of the sitemaps viz HTML and XML sitemap.
HTML Sitemap
HTML sitemap contains the list of the pages within the site. It is a basic format of the sitemap we can think of. In case if your site is static, this might be a better option.
Generally HTML sitemap list the links with relevant page titles, with the page titles being linked to the specific pages. Another advantage of HTML Sitemaps would be to guide a user. For example, in case a user can’t find a page s/he is looking for, providing a sitemap can help them to navigate to the page.
XML Sitemap
In a simplest form, XML Sitemap is pretty similar to the HTML sitemap with the list of the pages. But XML sitemaps provide more flexibility when it comes to providing more detailed information about the pages.
For example if you have a list of blog post and you want to provide the details such as author name, date of the blog posted on, categories it’s been listed on, XML sitemap works very well. XML, short hand for Extensible Markup Language provides flexible text format to write structured data information.
So why is sitemap important for website?
Why to use sitemap and what significance does it have? All of us want to list our site in SEO don’t we? Here is where sitemap plays the major role. Apart from guiding user to a page s/he is looking for sitemap provide a way to locate pages for search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing etc which they may or may not be able to find. More additional information of the sites as discussed with relevance of XML sitemaps can also be added via sitemaps.
Detailed information about the sitemap, its importance and how to write proper structured sitemaps can be found here. So if you haven’t created one for your site, it’s time to create one and submit it to the SEO engines.