28. What is a Sitemap? Why is a Sitemap needed for a website?

A Sitemap is a file that contains URL’s of all pages on your website. You can call it an index of your website.  The file format is XML. The purpose of a Sitemap is to let the search engine crawlers follow links to all your webpages to ensure that they do not miss any pages while crawling. Hence it’s important that this file be easily found in your website.

URLs of pages you do not want users to find should be removed. These URLs are cannot be crawled and thus wont be indexed by search engine spiders.

Now lets come to making a Sitemap. It is rather easy to create. WordPress users can download sitemap plugins which helps to generate an XML sitemap without having to go through any process.

Well, in case you are not using WordPress which most people are not, there are many XML-Sitemaps generator tools which are easy to use and implement.

Well, you might ask why a site map and how does it affect my SEO?

The answer is Yes, Sitemaps will add more value to your SEO efforts. The more the Search engines see, the more pages of your website gets indexed and this helps you gain more trust from the search engine. It means that your website has more information to offer and the more relevant this content the better it would be for your website.

In simple words, ensuring that all your relevant website pages are crawled by the search engine spiders is the purpose of putting up a sitemap.

Our sitemap will help you understand this better.