Don’t Get Yourself Confuse Over Sitemaps

Sitemaps has been one of the most essential part of well-designed and fully optimized website. It is one of the critical requirements for most search engines like Google and yahoo (Bing) in order for them to index your site’s pages faster.

But many people are asking questions like how important it is? How sitemap can increase traffic and provide better user experience? I will explain in here what are those benefits and functions of a sitemap for a website. Before that, you need to know what sitemap is.

What are Sitemaps?

Sitemap is a list of pages in a website accessible to site visitors and search engine crawlers. Sitemaps is typically organized in a hierarchical fashion that helps both crawlers and website visitors to easily navigate a site’s existing pages.

As yet, there are still others that are confused about sitemap. Especially for those are new to web development and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Yes, I've been there too. I came across to a blog post where the topic is all about essentials in building a website. They cover about how a sitemap can help drive traffic to a website.


The whole articles make sense to me except for the sitemap. Because I created an HTML sitemap that took me few days to finished. And yeah, I later found out that it was useless at all and a waste of time. For those newbies about sitemap, here's a basic information for you to better understand about Sitemap.


Now, there are two types of sitemap. HTML and XML based sitemap. HTML based sitemap is intended for website user while XML based sitemap is intended for the use of search engine crawlers. I will explain briefly the two type of sitemap below with a sample screenshots.

HTML Based Sitemap

This sitemap is designed specifically for easy navigation for site’s users. This is useful for large-scale websites with 50 to 100 pages. Normally, HTML sitemap is a separate page with a list of pages neatly organized from parent page to its sub-pages.  I will show you how HTML Based Sitemap looks like.

Refer to the screenshot below taken from JobBoard theme by Templatic.

XML Based Sitemap

XML Sitemap is different from HTML sitemap. This sitemap is for search engine crawlers to discover your websites pages. By submitting your xml sitemap to search engines will enable them to index your site’s dynamic pages.

If you’re using WordPress, you can easily create xml based sitemap through some plug-ins. Just install it and configure correctly and then submit it to google and bing. You can try WordPress SEO by Yoast or Google XML sitemaps plug-in . Both are free to download and will create XML sitemaps automatically once you installed it in your wordpress.

If you’re using static html pages, you can still create XML based sitemap by using XML sitemap generator.

The screenshot below will show you how an XML Based Sitemap will look like.

This xml sitemap is generated by SEO by Yoast plugin for a job board website from the Philippines.
Note. As you can see above image, there are 13 sitemaps generated. Those sitemaps are the parent sitemap links that contains other sub-links.


There you have it all, I hope you understand what a sitemap is, and the difference between XML and HTML based sitemaps. Using both  are very beneficial. So it's up to you.