What is a sitemap? Easily explained
If you want to put your own website online, sooner or later you will be confronted with the term "sitemap". In this practical tip, we explain what a sitemap is and what it is used for.
Sitemap - hierarchical overview of a website
A sitemap is first of all a file with a page overview, which lists all pages of a website hierarchically and thus also takes the sub-pages into account.
- Sitemaps were originally intended to give website visitors an overview of the individual pages.
- Today sitemaps are especially relevant for search engines to correctly list the websites in the search results.
- Although very few internet users navigate through the sitemap, you should provide a sitemap for your website. This affects how far ahead your website appears in the search results.
There are these sitemap types
You can deploy two different types of sitemaps.
- There is the so-called HTML sitemap, which is still intended for visitors to your homepage. If you want to create an HTML sitemap, we will show you in the next practical tip how to create an HTML sitemap.
- The second type of sitemaps is the Web XML sitemap. You should create these to help search engines correctly list your website. In a Web XML sitemap, you specify not only the page structure but also how often the content is updated. You can easily create such a sitemap at www.sitemap-maker.com.
- If you work with a content management system such as WordPress or Joomla, you will also find appropriate sitemap plugins that automatically create a sitemap for your website.
