What is a website sitemap?
A sitemap is a blueprint of your website that helps search engines find, crawl and index all of your website’s content.
You want Google to crawl every important page of your website. But sometimes, pages end up without any internal links pointing to them, making them hard to find. An XML sitemap lists a website’s important pages, making sure Google can find and crawl them all, as well as helping the search engines understand your website structure.
Why is having a sitemap important for SEO?
In the example below, a search engine will find all seven pages in a sitemap with one visit to your XML sitemap file. On the website, it will have to crawl through four internal links to find page 7.
In other words, XML Sitemaps can improve crawl rates and the speed at which a website can be indexed by the search engines, and can help prevent duplicate content issues.
