What is Sitemap?
A site map (or sitemap)
is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It
can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web
design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically
organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine
bots find pages on the site.
While some developers argue that site index
is a more appropriately used term to relay page function, web visitors
are used to seeing each term and generally associate both as one and
the same. However, a site index is often used to mean an A-Z index that
provides access to particular content, while a site map provides a
general top-down view of the overall site contents.
XML
is a document structure and encoding standard used, amongst many other
things, as the standard for webcrawlers to find and parse sitemaps.
There is an example of an XML sitemap below (missing link to site).
The instructions to the sitemap are
given to the crawler bot by a Robots Text file, an example of this is
also given below. Site maps can improve search engine optimization of a
site by making sure that all the pages can be found. This is
especially important if a site uses a dynamic access to content such as
Adobe Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links.