What is sitemap?
What exactly is a sitemap? A Sitemap is a key element of any good web site. A Sitemap helps to better serve visitors online experience. It sends the content about your web site to the major search engines for indexing.
A sitemap is just a collection of links organized by a common theme. There are many different types of sitemaps used all over the internet. Many people use META tags and a sitemap generator for their site to make it easy to create a sitemap. Creating a sitemap with a sitemap generator can save you some time. Some generators can even tell you exactly where to put the different headings in the XML file to organize your sitemap. There are many other benefits to having your sitemap in a format that search engines can read.
The main benefit of the XML sitemap is that search engines can crawl and read it. When a search engine runs a query for your web site, the page that comes up in the results is determined by what the user has typed in the address bar. If you had a list of web pages similar to your own, it would take much longer to find one that contained the keywords you were trying for. If your keywords are all in a sitemap, the search engine will pick the page up very quickly. In fact, your site could very well be listed within minutes.
Another benefit of the XML sitemap is that search engines can use it to generate rankings. In order to do this, all a search engine has to do is scan through all of your web pages and determine which ones have links pointing back to them. If you only have a few pages, it might take longer to find the link that points back to your homepage, but it will be there if you need it. If you have hundreds or thousands of pages, the amount of time it takes to crawl and index your entire site is much shorter.
Another benefit of having an XML sitemap is that search engines can tell how important your pages are. They can see which pages you need to link back to, and they can determine how important your pages are. Google calculates the relevance of a site in an XML format based on the number of important pages, the number of internal links to other sites, and the total number of words on the page. Because your homepage is one of the most important pages, Google tends not to link directly to it when you are ranking for that keyword.
XML sitemaps are also used by some search engines to determine where a particular URL should be placed in their results. Google, for example, will use the lastmod attribute to determine where the current URL on a site that is ranked for a particular keyword should be placed. Other search engines, such as Yahoo!, still use the lastmod attribute as well, but they do so less frequently.