XML Site Map vs. HTML SIte Map

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What is a Sitemap?

Sitemaps are navigational helpers provided on a website to help ensure efficient crawling of their pages by the search engines. They help in providing information to the crawlers about the pages in a website, and their file structure. It’s like a route map you use when going to an unknown place.

When search engine bots visits a website, they have no idea about what content is on the website, and how many pages is available on the site. Sitemaps come in at this point and give information for the search engine bots like how many pages are on the website, how frequently are new content published on the website and what is the importance of each page.

The Two Different Site Maps

i) XML sitemaps
XML sitemaps are intended for search engines and helps them index the appropriate pages from that website. They are basically an XML file that has all the pages in the website listed in the appropriate order with the necessary information tagged to it.

ii) HTML sitemaps
HTML sitemaps are basically HTML files that have the entire pages of a website listed in the appropriate order with the necessary information tagged to it.

In this article, we will refer and discuss about XML sitemaps more than HTML sitemaps because XML sitemaps deal with search engine optimization and indexing.

Where can you find a sitemap, and what is the right way to set up a sitemap?

Sitemaps (XML sitemaps) are generally located at the root folder of your website. They should not be placed anywhere else, or they won’t function well. The root folder in most cases are at public_html directory or sometimes even at httpdocs or htdocs folder of your server.

General format of a sitemap

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Here is a screenshot of a sample sitemap.

According to sitemaps.org, which is a common agreement between search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, the above is a typical example of how an xml sitemap should look like. Download the sitemap standard template.

Here there are four types of information specified.

1 – URL (<loc>)– The url of the page you want the search engines to index.
2 – Modified date (<lastmod>)– The date on which the content was published. This could be the renewal date or the created date.
3 – Change frequency (<changefreq>)– This information tells the search engines how frequently the listed page will change. This could be monthly, daily, weekly etc based on the change frequency of the page. 
4 – Priority (<priority>)– This is the relative importance of the page.

The purpose of the sitemap is to give the search engines all the above information for every page listed on the sitemap.

How many URLs per Sitemap?

Suppose you have a website that has a million webpages (some sites do), can you place all the pages on a single sitemap? Well, unfortunately no. Google and the league of other search engines suggests that every sitemap should have only a limited number of pages/urls listed in it and that’s 50,000 URLs per sitemap. Also, any given sitemap file should not be more than 10MB (10,485,760 bytes) file size.

If you have more number of URLs to submit on a sitemap, you have to split it up into more than one sitemap and link them up all together on a master sitemap file.

Are sitemaps needed anymore?

YES. A good website design will have a site map.  Even though pages can be indexed from a website following quality backlinks, it cannot be confirmed that all the pages will be indexed, due to variety of reasons. But if you have a sitemap ready, with all the information in place, one can confirm that all the pages are indexed on Google and the other search engines.

There have also been instances where sites without sitemaps have also made it to the search engines without much difficulty. That’s fine, but if you have a website that is not well reputed yet on the search engines, and have fewer backlinks, then submitting a sitemap will help. And if you have a website with large amount of content, sitemaps gives you an opportunity to organize the content and get the best ones out there on the search engines.

How to create an XML Sitemap file?

Creating a sitemap is easy. There are a lot of free sitemap generators available on the internet today, like this one – XML –Sitemaps, which will generate you a free sitemap if you give the website URL. You can also set the preferences like publishing frequency and priority.

If you are on Wordpress blogs, there is a wonderful plugin that will create sitemaps automatically once when you publish a new article.Get the plugin here.

The general XML sitemap file is accepted as a standard by all leading search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN, so there is no need to create one sitemap for each, but you just need one good XML sitemap file.

How to Submit an .XML site Map

You can let the search engines know about your sitemap through the Robots.txt file with this simple command. Just add this command to the robots.txt file replacing the sitemap_location with the actual URL to the sitemap. (Ex:- http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml)

Sitemap: <sitemap_location>

You can add more sietmaps through the Robots.txt file using the command.

Sitemap: <sitemap1_location>
Sitemap: <sitemap2_location>