What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is a powerful tool that allows a webmaster to provide detailed information about the structure of a site in order to facilitate the crawling of pages by search engines. An XML sitemap is a way for website owners to tell search engines about all the pages that exist on their website.

What is a Sitemap for?

Even if we don’t do this, search engines navigate all the pages in our website and follow all their links. With this file, we’re giving search engines a list of the pages we want the crawlers to navigate when indexing websites. Sometimes we leave out URLs or hide them from all visible pages because we don’t exactly want some of the users to go there. As a result, some of these URLs are uncrawlable to search engine spiders.

How does your Sitemap affect your SEO?

The structure of your website plays a tremendous role in its overall SEO authority, and the specific navigation elements you put into place deserve plenty of attention in this process. Your site navigation consideration should be to avoid using navigation types that make it difficult for the search engines to crawl through your pages. Search engines should see all the pages that you want them to see. The more pages that they index from you, the more trust your site gains. It only means that your website has more information to offer.