XML and HTML Sitemaps

 Sitemaps are important with helping Google find your website.

There are two popular versions of a site map that are important to your website, an XML sitemap and HTML sitemap.

An XML Sitemap is a structured format that a user doesn’t need to see, but it tells the search engine about the pages in a site, their relative importance to each other, and how often they are updated.  HTML sitemaps are designed for the user to help them find content on a particular page, and don’t need to include each and every sub category page.  Sitemaps help visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.

XML Sitemaps are especially helpful if:
•    You have a brand new website
•    Your have got a lot of pages
•    You don’t have desired Google Page Rank
•    Your website has complex navigation
•    Some of your web pages are either not accessible from the main page.

An XML sitemap is specifically written for search engine spiders. A search engine spider can quickly and easily extract all the important pieces of information about your site by looking at the XML file. An HTML sitemap enables lost human users to find a page on your site that they are looking for.

sitemap is a file where you can list the web pages of your site to tell Google and other search engines about the organization of your site content. Search engine web crawlers like Googlebot read this file to more intelligently crawl your site.

sitemap is vital for good SEO practices, and SEO is vital in bringing in traffic and revenue to the website. On the flip side, sitemaps are essential to having search engines crawl and index the website so that the content within it can be ranked within the search results.

Think of your website as a house and each page of your site as a room. … XML Sitemaps are important for SEO because they make it easier for Google to find your site’s pages—this is important because Google ranks web PAGES not just websites.

Each has different uses and values for search engine optimization. HTML sitemapsare primarily designed to help guide shoppers. XML sitemaps are used solely to ensure that search engine crawlers can index the URLs listed on a site. Each sitemaphas unique strengths and weaknesses when it comes to SEO

Good question. The short answer is that it is not necessary for SEO if you have pages linked elsewhere (such as your menu and category pages), but it can be beneficial. …Sitemap (XML) helps Google as a search engine to move its crawlers to crawl each page on your website and index them