A Sitemap is not Just a Map, it’s an SEO Tool (SEO Series - Article 8) Article by Plusto Editor
Sitemaps are not just for users anymore; search engine spiders use 'XML protocol' sitemaps to better understand and more efficiently index websites. Sitemaps A sitemap is a way of organising a website, identifying the URLs and the information by section or page. In the past, users summoned the sitemap when they wanted to quickly get to a subdirectory or they were having trouble navigating to specific information. Now, the sitemap is also a search spider optimising tool. In its simplest form, a sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL:
when it was last updated; how often it usually changes; how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site.
The sitemap lets you inform search engines about the pages on your web site. The Sitemap Protocol Google's developed its sitemap protocol in response to the increasing size and complexity of websites. Business websites often contained hundreds of products in their catalogues, blogs are updated very frequently and social websites encouraged more and more interaction. It was difficult for search engines to keep track of all this material, creating an unacceptable level of misses as it crawled through rapidly changing pages. The XML protocol lets search engines optimise searches by placing all the information in one page, summarising frequency of updates and recording last update.