To have a normal sitemap on your blog and website is an easy way for your visitors to jump to any page on your site. It can make your navigation easy if you have a big site with lots of pages. Usually these sitemaps are created by normal HTML and they are know as HTML Sitemaps.
Even though this is a easy way to jump to any page in your website, is it written in clear well formatted HTML so that search engines can find your content easily? This is where XML Sitemaps can come in handy.
Take from Wikipedia:
A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.
The XML Sitemap was first introduced in 2005 by Google and adopted in late 2009 by both MSN search and YAHOO. Later Ask.com also joined in so that now all the major search engines supports this Sitemap protocol. XML Sitemaps is a important element in achieving SEO results.
XML Sitemaps is a easy for webmasters to inform search engines about all the pages on their website that’s available for crawling and indexing. On the XML Sitemap it lists all the pages of the website along with when it was last updated and how often the content changes.
The XML Sitemaps protocol is a standard that makes it easier to create a sitemap that can be parsed by all the major search engines. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the sitemap
Depending on how your website is structured and if the navigation is easy, it can be easier for search engines to find all of your pages and content with a XML Sitemap.
Contact us if you require additional information regarding the creation of a XML Sitemap file or leave your comment below.