What is sitemap in a website?

GK | September 9, 2014 | SEO | No Comments

A sitemap is a structured collection of website navigation that allows the user to navigate through the website, easy to find the information they are looking for.

There are two versions of sitemaps one is HTML sitemap designed for users to find out the content and information on the website easily. In HTML sitemap, it is not necessary to include all sub-pages. The anchor text linked to its relevant section of the website. The website visitor can use HTML sitemap to find any specific section of the website that they unable to find.

Another one is XML sitemaps, user does not need to see XML sitemap because they are for Search engines only. XML sitemaps tell search engines about new created pages and edited pages information.

XML sitemaps simply are xml file containing all links of the website and helps spiders to crawl website better. There are other factors also included with website urls like –

1 – Last modified date – This is the last modification date of file.

2 –Priority – This define the page importance in the sitemap.

3- Change Frequency – Change frequency to weekly from monthly to index website frequently. Spiders will index the new blog and index the updated pages frequently.

XML sitemap example –

Please visit to see- How to create xml sitemap?

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

  <url>
    <loc>http://ecomspark.com/html5-forms-input-types/</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-08-17 06:52</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>50%</priority>
  </url>

  <url>
    <loc>http://ecomspark.com/html5-semantics-elements-html5-tutorial-part-2/</loc>
    <lastmod>2014-08-07 18:36</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>40%</priority>
  </url>
  <url>

</urlset>

XML document starts with XML declarations –

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

URL set is the container element –

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">

<url> </url>, contains all the information of a url.

Location – It contains the page url that need to be crawl by the search engines.

<loc>http://ecomspark.com/html5-forms-input-types/</loc>

Last modified – Last modification date of the page.

 <lastmod>2014-08-17 06:52</lastmod>

Priority – It is the priority to other pages in the document. It could be from 0.1 to 1.0 or in % 10 to 100% . Priority should not be equal for all pages.

 <priority>50%</priority>

Change Frequency – This is for the search engines to crawl website frequently. Never use the option “never”, to tell the search engine never to spider it. Use your robots.txt file for that.