What Is a Sitemap?

Types Of Sitemaps

There are two types of sitemaps:

1. HTML Sitemaps
2. XML Sitemaps

Html Sitemaps

An HTML sitemap is a file that contains all the important pages of your website that should be indexed by search engines such as Google and Yandex. Indexing refers to how search engines collect your landing pages and store them in their database. The search engine uses this database to answer questions from search engine users.

Example Of Html Sitemap

XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps helps Google bots or another bots to better index your site. It also helps them understand the most important URLs on your site. You can generate XML sitemaps easily with Sitemap Generator tool.

Below is a screenshot of an XML Sitemap:

This ability of an XML Sitemap to help index crawlers faster is especially important for sites that:

• It has thousands of pages and/or extensive site architecture.
• Add new pages regularly.
• Periodically change the content of existing pages.
• They suffer from weak internal links and orphaned pages.
• There is no strong external link profile.

XML Sitemaps are further divided into the following types:

1. Image Sitemaps
2. Video Sitemaps
3. News Sitemaps

Image Sitemap

• An image sitemap is for images.
• Having an image site map makes it easier to display images in Google Image Search
• <"Image: image"> and <"image: place"> tags are mandatory tags for an image site map.
• Read more about Image Sitemaps

Video Sitemap

• Like an image sitemap, a video sitemap helps distinguish your videos in SERPs and Help google bots to better understand video content.
• <url>, <loc>, <video: video>, <video: thumbnail_loc>, <video: title>, <video: description>, <video: content_loc> and <video: player_loc> are required tags for a video site card
• Read more about Video Sitemaps

News Sitemap

• This Sitemap is required for news sites
• Newspapers cannot contain articles more than 2 days in advance
• Recommended Urls For One News Sitemap is 999 URLs
• Read more about News Sitemaps