What is a sitemap?
A sitemap is an overview of all the important pages on your Web site that you provide to search engines such as Google to help them better understand and search your Web site. You can think of it as a kind of road map that guides the search engines to all the important parts of your site. There are two types of sitemaps: an HTML sitemap and an XML sitemap. The HTML version is primarily intended for visitors to your Web site to quickly find the most important pages, while the XML sitemap is designed specifically for search engines.
The XML sitemap is most relevant to search engine optimization(SEO). This sitemap contains a list of all the pages you would like included in search results. Think product pages, blog articles or category pages. By sending this sitemap to search engines, you give them a clear overview of what's on your Web site. This is especially useful if you have a large Web site with many pages, because otherwise search engines may not know how to find all the pages, especially if some pages are hidden deeper in the site.
Using a sitemap is an important step in optimizing your Web site for search engines, but it is not the only factor that determines whether and how well your pages are indexed. Your sitemap should include all important pages, and you should update it regularly to make sure it stays current. It is important to submit your sitemap through Google Search Console so that Google can use it when crawling your site. But in addition to a sitemap, other factors that affect indexing include the robots tag, the canonical tag, and the robots.txt file. For example, the robots tag determines whether or not a page should be indexed, while the canonical tag indicates which version of a page should be considered the preferred version. The robots.txt file controls which parts of your site may be crawled by search engines at all. By combining a sitemap with these other SEO tools, you ensure that search engines can best understand your Web site.
