What is a Sitemap? | What Types of Sitemaps Are There? | Why do you need a Sitemap? | Who Uses Sitemaps? | How to Create a Sitemap? | How to Submit Sitemaps to Search Engines?

Imagine that you are a content creator. Every week you produce dozens of videos or art pieces which you then post on various websites. At this, your ultimate goal is to bring home traffic to your website to make money by selling merchandise, showing ads, or serving visitors who support you directly. You want your website to be neat, organized, and easy to navigate. Site mapping can help you with that.

Content is the heart and soul of a company’s website. Without good content, your website will not be successful, and your business will likely have a difficult time sustaining in this ever-changing world. With so many businesses and websites out there, customers will go where they feel comfortable. When your website content is not inviting or helpful, they will take their business elsewhere. This is why it is so important to make sure you strategize before publishing your website. Planning what kind of content your website will have and how you will present it can only help you to be more prepared for what lies ahead. With both technology and the world constantly changing, you will need to make sure your website content is keeping up with the competition that is out there.

Planning will help you to determine what goals your company has and how you would like to meet them through setting up your website and having it go live. It will also assist you in targeting the audiences and demographics you want to reach. Depending on the size of your business, you will want to consider what areas you want to reach. Knowing and understanding your audience is also part of the content planning, and it will help you choose the best content that speaks to people and draws them in. In addition, planning allows you to test out your content before spending the time and money on coding. This way, you can find what works and what doesn’t work. Fix problems before they become detrimental to your business. No one ever regretted planning ahead.

Information architecture is known to be the structural design of environments of shared information. In general, it involves a concept or model of information that is applied to activities that will require specific details of intricate details of a complex information system. It is the way that content is organized and then categorized on a website. Many people think of information architecture kind of as “buckets of information” that will make up the sections within the website. Then, the concepts or content that can be grouped together will go into the same “bucket”. All websites have their own information architecture, but do not encounter the same problems, although most of them actually have holes in their information architecture or poor IA altogether, causing navigation difficulties for website visitors. Having a great information architecture and sitemaps will ensure that the maximum amount of website visitors will be able to find what they are looking for, thus improving your conversion and website ROI (return on investment).

A sitemap is a file that contains a list of pages on a website, to allowing web crawlers like Googlebot to crawl a website. Many web crawlers are able to explore and discover all files on a website, but with the help of a sitemap a crawler can gather metadata about the site. This metadata will tell how often information on the page changes, indicating how often the web page should be crawled. It will also show the details about content that would be hard for a search engine to analyze—like file descriptions for images or videos. Google's Search Console allows you to view, add, and test out sitemaps.

A sitemap is a file that contains a list of the web pages that are on a website. It will relay to Google and other search engines the organization of the website's content. Googlebot and other search engine crawlers will read the sitemap so that they can crawl your site with more knowledge. These sitemaps can also hold important metadata regarding the pages that are listed within the sitemap. Metadata is any information about a web page—like how often it is changed, its importance in relation to the other pages on the site, when it was last updated, and more. Sitemaps can be used to give Google metadata that is associated with particular types of content on the web pages like videos, images, and mobile content. A video entry on a sitemap can indicate the video's running time, age rating, and category. An image entry on a sitemap may tell the type, subject matter, and license.