A visual sitemap acts as a planner for your website. It can be used in the same way as a set of directions if you are traveling to a location that you have never been to before. It can also be thought of as a set of instructions, seeing as how you have sat down well beforehand and made this sitemap so that it will help you successfully create your own website. It is a flowchart. We all grew up using flow charts for different classes whether we were in elementary school or college. So it only makes sense that we continue to plan out what we need to do in such a way as we are able to make things easier on ourselves.

Sitemaps are a necessity for SEO

A sitemap is defined as a simple directory or guide that holds information along with other details on web pages that are contained on a website, in addition to the content on these pages. Search engines will do their job in crawling a sitemap to find and identify all information that is applicable to a specific search query that has been performed. The pages within the directory are listed in a logical hierarchical order, where the most relevant pages will be listed at the top, and the least relevant pages will be placed closer to the bottom.

Sitemaps are the best and easiest way for webmasters to inform major search engines about pages on their website that are open for crawling and indexing. Broken down simply, a sitemap is an XML file that is a list of URLs contained on each site, along with added metadata about each of the URLs so that the search engines can more accurately crawl these sites. This metadata can be anything from how often it changes, when it was last updated, its priority in relation to other pages on the site, and much more.

A sitemap is a file that contains a list of many web pages that are contained in a single website. It is used to tell search engines about the site content and how it is organized. Web crawlers used by search engines will read the file in order to gain more knowledge about the website, and crawl it more effectively. The sitemap will also provide very valuable metadata that is associated with the web pages that are listed on the sitemap. Metadata is data about the webpage—this would include information like how often the web page is changed, when it was last updated, and its importance in relation to the other pages in the website.

In the process of optimizing websites, an extremely important part of the puzzle is submitting the sitemap. The purpose of the sitemap is to ensure that search engines will discover all pages contained on the website, and will download them quickly when changes have been made. Here, you will discover more about why sitemaps are important, how to optimize them for search engines, and when to use an XML sitemap and RSS or Atom feed.