What Is A Sitemap?

A Site-map is a navigation tool or a reference point for all of the content on a website.

It is basically the same concept as an index in a book.

A good quality site-map will provide direct links to all publicly viewable content in a well structured and ordered list.

Common items listed on a site map are usually…

The websites pages.
The blog categories.
The blog posts.
The blog archives.
The tags used on the site.
and the RSS feed for the site.

Depending on the size of the website the site-map can be one page or many.

Sitemaps can benefit both the human or robotic visitors of your site, by robots I am referring to search engines crawling your website for new content to index.

A good practice is to have a link to your sitemap in your main page navigation, making it easy for your visitors to find specific pages without having to search through different categories or archives.

There are two main types of sitemaps your website should have.

XML Sitemap.
.html or .php sitemap.

An XML sitemap is purely for search engines to spider or crawl your site, whilst the .html or .php sitemap is for your human visitors.

To give you an example of how the two sitemaps are different and why you wouldn’t send your human visitors to your XML sitemap have a look at my XML Sitemap Here.

Then compare that by looking at my PHP sitemap.

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