Website Sitemaps

What is a sitemap in a website?

Welcome back to TheSEOGuy. Hope you enjoyed the information we shared earlier about Types of SEO. Today we are going to share insights about Website Sitemaps. We will learn how it works, who uses the sitemap and how does sitemap help us.

Let’s learn everything about website sitemaps in easiest way possible.

Think of Website as Big House

Imagine a website to be like an enormous house with many rooms. Each room has something different inside. Some rooms are easier to find, such as the living room or the kitchen (these are like the homepage or the principal pages). Still, some rooms will be hidden or hard to get to (these are like less frequent pages). Website is just like a home where you create different pages for different purpose. Some pages are important and some are not so important. Based on the uses and priority we list the pages on website.

Step 2: The Sitemap is the House Map

Now, if one shows you a map of the house, you can see all the rooms and where they are located. It would be similar to a list or map showing all the pages within the website. A sitemap is self-explanatory world which is all about website map. Just like the house maps, website sitemaps includes map of all the pages available inside a website. It helps search engine crawlers and users to locate the page easily.

Step 3: Who Uses the Sitemap?

Two kinds of visitors use the sitemap:

• People (such as you and me) who want to explore the website and find things easily.
• Search Engines (such as Google) that have to scan all the pages so they can display the appropriate pages for when somebody searches for something.

Step 4: How Does the Sitemap Help?

• For people, it will be like a menu that indicates what’s on the website.
• For search engines, it is helpful to find every important room (page) so they can appear in search results. Without a sitemap, they may not find all the rooms.

Step 5: What do you find inside a sitemap?

A sitemap is a list of links to all pages. It contains all website pages such as:

• Home
• About Us
• Contact Us
• Blog
• Products or Services

Step 6: Updating the Map

Whenever we add or create a new page on website, it is important to submit the sitemap and inform search engines about the new page. You can include the page in sitemap manually or use third party applications to put your page in sitemap. Once the sitemap is updated, search engine crawlers will be able to read the page along with users.

How to check website sitemap?

If you want to check the sitemap of any website, you can simply write /sitemap.xml after the domain name and it will open the website sitemap.

In some cases, big websites use compresses sitemap. This version of sitemap does not appear by writing /sitemap.xml after the domain name. To open compressed sitemap you need to put .gz extension after the query. For example:

Type sitemap.xml.gz it will download the file in your system which you can open in excel.

In order to open such file in excel, follow the steps given below:

• Open excel work book
• Go to files and click on open
• Locate the downloaded file
• Select the file
• It will give you a prompt to open file as table
• Click on yes and it will open the file for you

In Brief

A sitemap is a kind of guidebook or map for both humans and search engines about where things are in navigating around a website. It lets one know where things are, so nothing gets lost.

Hope this information on website sitemaps will help you understand the role of sitemap. If you have any feedback for us, do comment below. Keep exploring TheSEOGuy for latest SEO Tips and tricks. We provide the best SEO services in Delhi NCR. Talk to our experts today!