What is sitemap? And its importance?

 A sitemap is like a draft of your website that tells search engines to find, crawl and index all website content. It also tells search engines that which webpages are important. Sitemap is created to help search engines to understand your website better. When users search any query on Google. Google uses crawlers to find relevant search query and displays result. Hosting company like HTS best hosting company in India, provides Windows shared hosting, Linux dedicated hosting and other hosting plans.

Sitemap is also referred as list of website’s URLs. There are five types of sitemaps: -

• Video Sitemap – Used to help Google in understanding video content of your webpage.

• News Sitemap – Helps Google that are accepted in Google News.

• XML Sitemap – The most common sitemap that is written in XML (Extensible Markup Language). XML links different webpages on your website.

• HTML Sitemap – HTML sitemaps stores information about the website resources with their location. These sitemaps are used for users to give them assistance in finding desired website content and helps them to explore website efficiently.

• Image Sitemap – This sitemap helps Google to find images that are uploaded on your website.

Sitemap Requirement: -

Search engines are used to search for any desired query. Not every user can remember website. That’s why they write search queries on search engines. Search engines like – Google, Yahoo, Bing are committed to display most suited search results. To get search results effectively, search uses website crawlers to read, coordinate and index given information on the internet. Normal XML sitemap makes it easier for search engines crawlers to interpret given information on the internet.

As a good creation of XML, it also increases for good ranking in SEO of your website. Normal XML sitemap tells search engines, the location of webpage on your website. It also tells the update frequency, importance of webpage on your website.  

There are many newbies who tries to rank their website without knowing the concept of SEO (search engine optimization). Simply creating and uploading of your website won’t help in selling your product and services At last you will fail to uplift yourself on the internet. In some cases we have seen without appropriate sitemap Google bots take your website content as duplicate. This can even hurts your Google sitemap. But with proper sitemap there are lot of benefits in terms of SEO and for your website.

Benefits of Using Sitemap: -

• Review of your website structure – Everyone loves to work in structured manner. Every website owner should start with structuring website. Normally every website starts with homepage. Create a basic sitemap template and try to figure out how webpages will be structure. According to search engine journal, create a sitemap that is only three clicks away to navigate to a webpage. Follow a logical hierarchy to prioritize your content.

• Validating Code – Human error is very common thing while writing code. Use any code editor for writing XML without any error. There are ample amount of tools that are used in validating XML code.

• Add Website in Root and Robots.txt – Add sitemap file to the root directory of your website. There are different methods to look at the code by visiting yourdomainname/sitemap.xml.

Thus, sitemap is really important for your website. As it tells how your visitors are knowing your website.

Source:https://htswebhosting.wordpress.com/2021/03/02/what-is-sitemap-and-its-importance/