What Is A Sitemap & How Is It Used?

A sitemap is a list of the pages on a website accessible by search engine crawlers. A site map allows crawlers to understand the organization of your site and its content, can help visitors navigate a website, and can be beneficial as a planning tool during web design. Site maps are especially important when:

  • A site is large
  • A site has archived content that may not naturally reference each other
  • A site has limited external links
  • A site is new
  • A site uses an abundance of rich media content

Two types of popular sitemaps are:

  1. HTML sitemaps: designed for visitors or users and search engine bots to help them find pages on a site
  2. XML sitemaps: designed specifically for search engine crawlers to identify pages, see how they’re related to each other and how often they’re updated
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