Sitemaps

What are Sitemaps?

A sitemap is a list of pages of a website to crawlers or users. Sitemaps are mainly of two types - one for the crawler and another for the users.

 For the crawlers we use XML file and for the users we use HTML. We can view sitemaps of our blogs, websites in wordpress etc. To view the Sitemap of your website you can write following in address bar

Website name/sitemap.xml 
which is for the crawler

Website name/sitemap.html
which is for the users

Sitemap 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 website, typically organized in hierarchical fashion.

Types of Sitemaps:

• HTML sitemaps
• XML sitemaps

HTML sitemaps:

These are the sitemaps designed for users only to help them see the content on the page. and don't need to include each and every subpage. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site. You cannot submit an HTML sitemap in google webmaster tools as it is not a supported sitemap format.

XML sitemaps:

XML sitemap is a structured format that user doesn't need to see, but it tells the search engine about the  pages in a site and their relative importance to each other ans how often they are updated. It is a document structure and encoding standards used, amongst many other things as the standard for web crawlers for many other things to find and parse sitemaps. The instructions to sitemaps are given to the crawler by Robots text file. Sitemaps do not guarantee all links will be crawled and, being crawled does not guarantee indexing.

XML is more precise than HTML coding. Errors are not tolerated so syntax must be exact.

What is Sitemap Generator?

Sitemaps can be generated manually as well as automatically. To generate sitemaps manually we use online tool Sitemap generator. After this choose the first link and click on it. After that place your website name and you will be able to generate the sitemap for your website. In some websites we cazn install some plugins, extensions etc. which helps us to generate sitemaps automatically.

To learn more about this you can start SEO training in Chandigarh to become SEO professional