Sitemap Definition, Types And Its Advantages

Do you ever read the book especially related to education? If you say YES, you may notice the pages (or single page) which usually place at the beginning of the book. We call them the table of contents (TOC). Look the example below.



For your information, TOC also can be applied in a blog but with the slightly different name called SITEMAP. See below.

The Sitemap In A Blog

The sitemap is an index page of a blog, exist in form of single page. It lists every pages contains in a blog in hierarchical fashion. These lists of pages usually presented in form of page title with hyperlink. Once the users mouse click on it, they will be redirected to the appropriate page (which may contain article, video or audio).

The purpose of sitemap is to ease the visitors to find the needed contents from the visited blog. Besides, it also ease the web crawler to find the pages in a blog. I will cover the relationship between sitemap and web crawler later.


The Types Of Sitemap

In general, there are TWO types of sitemap. They are HTML sitemap and XML sitemap.

The HTML sitemap usually in form of single webpage that list all pages in a blog in hierarchical fashion. It usually used by blog’s visitor to view and navigate the entire contents of blog such as articles, video and audio.

The XML sitemap is useful to allow search engine like Google or Yahoo to take notice about all the pages in a blog. It can be achieve by submitting the XML sitemap to search engine through its webmaster tool, eg: Google Webmaster Tools.

In the simple words, the HTML sitemap is for human eyes and the XML sitemap is for search engine “eyes”.


The Advantages Of Sitemap

Actually, having the sitemap (especially the XML sitemap), will give a few advantages to the blog itself. These advantages are the following

1. Increase your blog’s chance to get the high ranking in search results so that it will drive some traffic into it.
   
   
2. It will allow the search engine like Google to trust your blog. This confidence will result the contents of your blog listed in search engine without any delay.
   
   
3. Sitemap is useful for new website to get attention more quickly from search engine than using the conventional search engine submission.
   
   
4. It can save the visitors’ time when searching the certain pages in a blog. Through sitemap, visitors can view the list of pages inside a blog and they can go to the target pages just by clicking the hyperlink