Sitemap - A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that helps search engines find, crawl, and index all of your website’s content. A sitemap tells Google which pages and files you think are important to your site and also provide valuable information about these files. Search engines like Google read this file to crawl your site more efficiently.
Why are Sitemaps Important especially in SEO
Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing use your sitemap to find different pages on your site.
If the site’s pages are properly linked, Google/ Yahoo/Bing, etc. web crawlers can usually discover most of the site. It also helps in understanding your website structure, making it easier to navigate your website.
For example, Google largely finds web pages through links. If the site is brand new and only has a handful of external backlinks, then a sitemap is HUGE for helping Google find pages on the site.
How to create a SITEMAP
There are two types of Sitemaps, XML and HTML.
XML documents act as a map for your site allowing a search engine robot to know which pages to check first for updates since it last crawled it helps to speed up the process in terms of page discovery and indexing for the search engines it also allows search engines to find really deep pages within your site so if you have deep content at four or five subfolders within your website this sitemap can help search engines find that easier an HTML Sitemap is actually geared more toward our human visitors than search engines it shows each one of the major sections of our website and then all the sub-pages within each of those sections so it gives a nice little breakdown of all the webpages on our site and helps our visitors to easily find the content they want.
How To Check if your Website has a SITEMAP
Go to your web browser and type your domain name followed by forwarding slash sitemap.xml or Sitemap HTML.
For example, www.example.com/sitemap.xml will show what your XML sitemap looks like.
If you don't have Sitemaps, you can go to www.xml-sitemaps.com