By definition, a sitemap is a map, list, or diagram of a website that provides an organized and easy understanding of the site’s contents and structure as per the users or the search engines. It provides a logical and structural arrangement of the operational website pages and their relationship. They are useful in enhancing the process of SEO since they help the search engines easily crawl through the site and as well understand the site’s architecture.
Sitemaps are important to those who own websites and those who use them since they are maps directing towards what a website contains. They are very useful especially when the website has a lot of pages and it is complex in the manner in which information is organized e.g., when dealing with ecommerce sites or news portals (media houses). By logically ordering information, these maps guarantee that all main pages can be accessed easily.
A sitemap is beneficial for SEO since it provides structure for when search engines crawl through a website. This improves how the pages are indexed and increases the visibility of such sites during online searches. Sitemaps help prioritize pages for crawling and indexing first by angling towards pages frequently changed and those that were considerably modified based on improved data.
Web users benefit from HTML sitemap by offering them an organized way in which they can navigate through the pages. The new visitors who have never been on the website before find this even more interesting because it makes everything easier for them. Therefore, it becomes possible to offer direct links to main sections and subsections, an HTML sitemap that can drastically improve user experience, facilitating fast access to required information.
The understanding of sitemaps has gone through significant changes in our time. In the beginning, there were simple HTML lists that had to be compiled by hand. However, since the early 2000s, the introduction of XML sitemaps has made this process easier thereby automating it as well but at a more advanced level than before. Today, nearly every CMS (content management system) or SEO tool comes equipped with the ability to create new content such as sitemaps which can keep them up-to-date always thus providing precise information.
Think about a blog with a huge number of articles divided among many groups. If they had an XML sitemap there would be links to all the articles together with the page where they are found in a particular category making it easier for search engines to identify and index such materials accordingly. Unlike XML maps, HTML maps serve as a guideline for readers concerning navigation routes within sites’ outlines by covering all groups plus essential papers.