All of you are familiar with maps. City Map, World Map etc. etc. But how many of you know about sitemap? Though it's a very common term to the webmasters, general people hardly know about this. Even new bloggers are not conscious about sitemap. The fact is that it's an important part of SEO. Let's take a brief idea on Sitemap.
Well a sitemap is something like City Map! What does a city map tell you? You can find the park, bus stand, university or any other important places from the map. From a World Map, you can find the nations of the world. Similarly, a sitemap includes the posts or pages of a blog or website.
Simply a sitemap can be defined as a list of pages of a site. A sitemap gives access search engines to crawl those pages. And it also let the visitors easily navigate throughout the site. If you submit your site's map to search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.) then it will be easier to index the site. Search position of the site will also be improved.
Search engines can't index the pages of your site if you don't submit the sitemap regularly. Crawlers discover pages from your site and also from backlinks. Sitemap boosts up the process. It provides additional information about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes etc.) and thus makes it easier for the search engines to crawl a site properly.
Look at the following URL:
http://munnamark.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
If you follow the URL, you will get the sitemap of Marks PC Solution. There you will find all the URL(s) of this site with some additional information. Let's have a look at the first few lines of the sitemap -
Note: If you follow my sitemap URL - http://munnamark.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500 - different browsers may display this differently. If you view the link in Chrome, you will see the above XML file.
In my next post, I will show an easy way to create a sitemap even without coding knowledge.
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