With the dynamic nature of the web, having a sitemap for your website is a necessity that can only be ignored by people courting their own peril. However, some webmasters get lost whenever they decide to create sitemap for their sites and realize there are two types; HTML and XML sitemaps. Well, though the roles of both sitemaps are closely related, their targets differ; while HTML sitemaps target users, XML sitemaps on the other hand are meant for the search engines.

To get the most from your XML sitemaps, you must understand several strategies that should be factored as you create a sitemap. Every website owner wants his or her website to make it to the first page in the SERPs, but that is not possible. Only a few out of over a billion websites in the world make it, and it is through implementing crucial SEO techniques over a long period of time. Note that search engines such as Google are constantly changing their algorithms aimed at ensuring that only the best websites are ranked higher, it is no longer easy to trick search engines into false website ranking.

A Sitemap is a list of pages containing URLs found within a website that is available to users and search engines in order to navigate through a website and aide the user in finding the content they are looking for. The two types of sitemaps that you should be concerned with are XML and HTML.

What are the differences between these two types of sitemaps?

HTML sitemaps are created and available for viewing by website visitors to help them navigate through a website. Usually, they are setup with a linear structure showing the hierarchy of the site from top level pages to lower level ones. They provide the user with a very easy to read outline of content, making their navigation to their desired content easier.

XML sitemaps are a little different from HTML sitemaps, because they are intended for search engines and spiders not website visitors. XML sitemaps can be visible with any web browser, but their main function is to provide the URLs of a website to search engines. They even show data on how often a page has been changed compared to other URLs on the same site. This information is very important for search engines because the more links they are provided with, the more a website will appear in search engine results.

What is a XML Sitemaps?

XML Site maps are documents that assist Google, Bing, and other search engines to understand a website’s content while looking through it for information users are looking for. Sitemaps are protocols that give the webmaster of a website the ability to inform search engines about the links of a website that can be viewed. Sitemaps give the permission to find every webpage to the engine that could otherwise be missed while indexing it.