Types of Sitemaps for SEO and When to Use Them

If you are Create sitemaps to direct crawlers through your very large site or your smaller that is bound for development, you have to know which sorts of sitemaps will work best for you and your business. The sort of Content, freshness of Content, great depth of your pages and site segments determine which Kinds of sitemaps and what variety of structure will prove best.

1. HTML Sitemaps

HTML sitemaps are Used for your human visitors. It is a map, that contains information about website resources & their location.This is primarily for users to assist them to find their desired item on website or to explore a website easily. HTML sitemaps can be viewed in any browser & crawled by all search engines.Memorialize that your HTML sitemap should contain at most a few hundred links, organize it carefully so your users get what they need from it. If a search engine were to crawl your HTML sitemap, they should be able to get to every page.

2. XML Sitemaps

The XML sitemap is the corollary to the HTML sitemap; it is for search engine web crawlers. XML sitemaps tell crawlers what pages are present, where they are, how often they are updated, and their relative importance. This is the main type of sitemap most websites add.

Crawlers use your XML sitemap to parse metadata for searches, and you use them to improve your indexing. Your XML sitemap can boost your optimization by ensuring that all of your site’s pages can be found. Every website needs at least this basic sitemap for SEO.

3. Text Sitemaps

Text sitemaps are simple, and list one URL per line. They can be crawled by Google and Yahoo, but not necessarily by others. Initially Yahoo crawlers were limited to text sitemaps, but now they support XML, so there is little reason to use this format. If you do have a text list you can always save it as a document and master list of all URLs.

4. RSS Feed Sitemap

RSS feeds can be used as sitemaps. Google and Yahoo support this use of RSS feeds, but not all search engines do. If your site has a very large RSS feed, it may be best to create a new RSS feed for each section of your site. If you publish fresh content on your site often, and you are not a news site, an RSS feed sitemap is really the best way to go. RSS feed sitemaps provide the quickest indexing capabilities out of all sitemaps. Generally, people will create an RSS feed sitemap for blog posts, articles, product feeds, etc. In some industries, there are websites that scrape other sites. In this case, an RSS feed sitemap would be ideal, as it allows the content to get indexed on the publisher’s site before any scrapers. Quick side note… I have spent years experimenting with RSS feeds and their impact on SEO. They can used to get quick indexing, build links, do social updates, etc. RSS is a very powerful too.

5. ROR Sitemaps

ROR stands for “Resources of a Resource.” It is actually a kind of XML format intended to describe any kind of web content in a generic way. The idea is that this allows anything—crawlers, apps, search engines—to understand the sitemap. ROR format includes various defined terms that are used to describe kinds of content and you can also use custom terms. The idea behind ROR format is to standardize the way content is classified by engines and provide better metadata. However, major search engines don’t support all of the ROR sitemap extensions, so this is not the best choice for most sites.

6. News Sitemap

News sitemaps are for sites that have many frequent updates and syndication feeds. A news sitemap should be limited to URLs from the most recent two days; they will stay in the Google News index for one month regardless. You also have to update this kind of sitemap as new content is published, although you should not create a new one (just add the new URLs). A news sitemap should be limited to 1,000 URLs or fewer. This is one kind of feed that is much easier to create automatically.

7. Image Sitemaps

You can create a separate sitemap for images or you can add information in the form of image extensions to your existing sitemap. Image sitemap information helps search engines who otherwise would not index your images in Google image search. I am a big fan of image sitemaps. Most people forget to implement them. They are incredibly easy to create and result in excellent traffic. I have seen e-commerce sites and news sites who get 30% of their search traffic from image sitemaps. In addition, having a good optimized image on the page really helps the HTML page rank as well, so it all works together.

8. Video Sitemaps

Much like image sitemaps, video sitemaps give search engines metadata about video content. A video sitemap (or video information within your existing sitemap) can provide Google with titles, runtimes, descriptions, categories, and intended audiences. This also allows you to show thumbnails of video content in searches. Also, letting Google know about rich video content can boost your rank. If you are running WordPress, there are some video sitemap plugins that are really easy to add.

9. Mobile Sitemap

Sitemaps for SEO, How to Achieve Full Indexing Potential

There are three ways to do mobile website optimization. Vary HTTP header, responsive design and a separate website or subdomain. Here are a few posts I have written on the topic.

• Mobile SEO Checklist
• Mobile SEO Checklist
• Everything Google Looks at For Mobile SEO
• Mobile SEO Basics, What you Need to Know
• Ultimate Guide to Responsive Design and SEO

If you are going to be going the subdomain/separate website route, websites will often create a mobile sitemap. Now, there are some SEO considerations with this one. Mainly, you need to make sure that Google understands the relationship between your desktop and mobile site. So if you are going to be submitting a mobile only sitemap, you need to make sure you have rel canonical in the HTML on the page of the mobile site and rel alternate on the desktop.

Conclusion on Sitemaps for SEO

There is almost never a good reason to skip a sitemap, and sometimes more than one kind is best for your website and business. If you don’t yet have this essential step towards better optimization in place, don’t wait any longer to create your sitemap. The right sitemap gives search engines much better data about your site, and boosts your rankings. So there you go! Get to adding these sitemaps to your site now.