The Complete Guide to Website Sitemaps
The Complete Guide to Website Sitemaps A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to crawl your site more efficiently. A sitemap tells search engines which pages and files you think are important in your site, and also provides valuable information about these files. Do I Need a Sitemap? Although sitemaps are generally considered best practices for websites, Google advises having one if the website is huge (>500 pages), just launched, and has few external links, or contains a lot of rich media material (pictures, videos), or appears in Google News. Types of Website Sitemaps XML and HTML sitemaps are the two primary forms of sitemaps, and each has advantages of its own. Let's take a closer look at each. XML Sitemaps Extensible Mark-up Language, or XML, is a file format that offers structu...