Sitemaps play a crucial role in improving a brand’s website’s Search Engine Optimization or SEO performance and overall organization. Sitemaps acts like a directory for search engines where all the critical data and information regarding sites, URLs, videos, and other files are hosted. It also works as a blueprint for users to effectively navigate the site, enabling search engine bots to crawl and categorize it more efficiently and in this way, users can find information they need quickly. Accurate implementation of Sitemap can change a site’s visibility and ranking significantly.
There are two types of Sitemaps, HTML and XML Sitemaps.
XML Sitemaps:
XML Sitemap makes information machine-readable and provides search engines with an efficient list of the URLs on a website or a page. By helping search engine crawlers and bots to analyze better, XML Sitemaps prioritize each page differently, ranging from 0.0 to 1.0, with their order of importance. XML also indicates to the crawler about time and date of recent modification with its frequency.
There are 4 types of XML Sitemaps:
- Image Sitemap is used to provide information to search engines about the images that exist on the website. It ensures that images used in a site appear in Google Image Search results. It also provides many other information like the location, title, license, and caption.
- Video Sitemap is similar to Image Sitemap. It helps videos that are on a page, to be discoverable by the audience in Search Engine Research Pages. It provides information like description, thumbnail and URL locations, duration, etc.
- News Sitemap is specifically used to name, highlight, and tag news sites because news sites have certain limitations. It is basically used by news publishers to generate the newsworthiness of their content in search engines. Information about articles, their publishing date, title, genre, etc contains in that.
- Mobile Sitemap is used for customizing or designing websites exclusively for mobile because of the current increasing importance of mobile phones. This Sitemap helps search engines understand the structure of a mobile website, ensuring better indexing and visibility in mobile search results for users.
HTML Sitemaps:
In contrast to XML, HTML Sitemaps are formatted links mostly found at the bottom of a website. It keeps the website organized and mostly helpful for the visitors to navigate through a variety of websites within the present website. Before the popularity of header-based navigation technology, HTML Sitemaps were very helpful with offering bots shortcut links to pages and by passing link authority it boosted ranks. It provided deep access to a page or a site to visitors.
Now in recent days, HTML Sitemaps have very limited SEO values. It only replicates links that are already either in header or footer.
