What Are Sitemaps And Why its Very Important For A Blog

 

What are sitemaps, and how to create a sitemap? Why is this so important? If we go back a few decades, we will know that earlier there used to be links on the main page of the official website, the same page called "Sitemap". Some websites still use the same HTML sitemap. But sitemap has also changed a lot with time, nowadays we publish sitemap in XML instead of HTML because the target audience is now search engines rather than people.

Recently someone asked me some sitemap questions. What is this sitemap? Why is this so important? How to create a sitemap? So many questions. So I thought why not give you some information about it today.

All the new bloggers who ask to create a new blog must know about it. So today we will know what is this sitemap and how to make a sitemap, it's complete information. Then what's the delay, let's start.

What is a sitemap?

In simple language, a sitemap is simply a list of pages on your website. According to Google, a sitemap is a list of your website or blog that lists all the pages on your blog that Google's search engines can't find unless you include them in the sitemap. Do not add.

Creating and submitting a sitemap lets Google know about their existence, otherwise sometimes Google's spider does not crawl those pages.

A sitemap is very important for any website or blog because it tells Search Engines about the pages of your blog, it also tells how the content is in your blog and how regularly they are updated. This information helps Search Engines to show your content in search results.

Why sitemap is very important for a blog?

By the way, if we look at it from the point of view of Search Engine Optimization, then Sitemap is very important for any website or blog. Like I have said before that the ranking of any website does not increase with Sitemap, but it is necessary that if any page is not indexed by you, then it definitely gets indexed.

If seen in a special way, it is very good for new Blogs or Websites. This is because new blogs generally do not get many back-links in their individual posts so they are not visible to search engines. And it is very difficult to find them in favor of search engines.

If we talk about old websites, then we can know that as their posts have been completely indexed, search engines keep crawling into them very easily. And as they keep updating their posts, this thing is also known to the search engines so that they fix the Crawl Rate for those websites. Due to this, the overall visibility of those websites increases significantly.

How search engines find sitemaps:

Search Engines are very smart in finding Sitemap. Whenever you publish a new post, then a ping reaches those search engines so that those search engines know that there is some change in the sitemap of that website.

Different types:

Here we will know how many types of sitemaps are there. By the way, they are mainly of two types.

    HTML Sitemap (Hypertext Markup Language)

    XML Sitemap (Extensible Markup Language)

Now XML sitemap also has two parts:

    Index Sitemap (How many URL Sitemaps are there in a website)

    URL Sitemap (Provides final URL information on a webpage)

URL sitemap also has three parts:

    The sitemap for Webpages (also called XML Sitemap in Community)

    Image Sitemap (URL of those images on the website and their details)

    Video Sitemap (details of those videos on the website)

What is an HTML sitemap?

As mentioned earlier, this is a map that keeps all the information about the website along with its location. With the help of these, we users can get any necessary things very easily.

As an example, if understood, then we can think that a website has thousands of web pages, and finding something in favor of a user is quite a difficult task, but with the help of a sitemap, that task becomes easy. goes.

What are XML sitemaps?

XML is basically like a language that stores the information of an object in some pre-defined format. It is impossible to understand this format in our favor but it is easily understood by Search Engines.

So we can say that XML sitemaps are mainly designed for search engines so that they can give information about the internal and external resources of a website to Search Engines.

Video sitemaps:

We can create sitemap of videos. For this we can create a new and separate file or provide the video information in the existing sitemap. Adding information increases their visibility in Rich Snippets.

Remember that Google can crawl only these video formats like WMV, mp4, MPEG, mpg, m4v, asf, Flv, SWF, avi, ra, and ram.

Image sitemaps:

An image sitemap is very important if you want your image to appear in Google's image search results. Similar to video sitemaps, we can add image information to the same existing sitemap.

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