We all know that having a website is not going to get you more sales. It is important that your target audience is aware of your website. This is where search engine optimisation comes into the picture. Now SEO is not just about having the right keywords in your website. It is equally important that the user gets a good experience and there needs to be clarity. The user must get clear answers to the queries that they have. People tend to ignore sitemap.xml.

What is Sitemap.xml?

It is a visual representation in the .xml file. The information is available in Extensible Hyper Text Mark up Language or XHTML. It represents the URL of all the pages of the website. The details about every URL are present here. Now the crawlers are looking out for quality pages that can be shown to the users. The information from the sitemap.xml can be useful for this purpose.

Understanding the difference between sitemap.xml and sitemap.html:

Now you will require two types of sitemaps for your page. That is in .xml and.html now the question is are they similar or are they different. They do have similarities but there are differences between the two.

In the case of .xml more advanced programming language is used. It gives more detailed information about the website to the search engine crawlers. You can add details with ease in a customised way in the case of .xml. Details like the importance of the page or when the page was updated etc can be added in the case of .xml. In the case of .html you cannot add information with ease as they make use of predefined tags.

The details that are added in the case of .xml are one of the best ways to get the attention of the crawlers. The details are added keeping SEO in mind. Whereas .html just links all the pages of the website. .html is an easy way for human visitors to navigate the website. Both have their own importance and it is better than you have both .xml and .html for your website.

The need for sitemap.xml:

• It is very important for a new website that is trying to get good rankings in the search engines. The crawlers will be able to identify the pages with ease and the crawlers will also get details about the importance of the pages of the website quickly and this will help in the rankings.
• If only certain pages of a website that has many pages have to be promoted then sitemap.xml will be important. It is possible to label the pages so that Google will notice them
• The website may have quality content but there may be no links. Now one can get penalised for the deficit of links. But a sitemap will give a fair idea to the crawlers about the website and will reduce the chances of penalty.
• It is also very useful for websites that have more media content and it is also useful for those websites where lots of new content is added on a regular basis.