Sitemaps are principally files that are made and generally uploaded to the root directory of websites/blogs to make sure that search engines are informed of the present pages of a site/blog. We need to have a good understanding of sitemap first. SEO services should consider including these files for their clients so their pages could more easily be indexed.

What’s a Sitemap?

It’s a document that shows the structure of a website/blog to human visitors and/or search engines. It could include all or major parts of a site. It could be in different formats with various usages:

HTML Sitemap

It’s a document that is primarily usable and useful for human visitors. SEO service providers should advise to place it within the site’s navigation menu somewhere that site visitors could find it easily. Such a webpage will have a hyperlink to at least the main sections of your site. The best practice will be to add a few sentences following such HTML links explaining what that particular section or page will have to offer to your visitors. Make sure the number of all your links isn’t so high. For instance, if you have around 100 links, split your page into two pages and have 50 in each. HTML sitemaps could be files named “sitemap.html”, “sitemap.htm”, etc.

XML Sitemap

It’s a document originally created by Google and later supported by Yahoo as well as MSN to be included in the root directory of sites/blogs. As the number of pages in the sites or blogs grows everyday, this mechanism is to make sure that a list of all existing files (pages) are submitted to search engines. This way, search engines can list all the pages, old and new, in a website. Note that such sitemaps aren’t used to increase search engine ranking of a website, but proper SEO services add them to your site so that they can help with the indexation of your site/blog. XML sitemaps aren’t for human visitors. They are files named “sitemap.xml”.

urllist Sitemap

It’s also known as Yahoo’s sitemap. It’s a file named urllist.txt in which a list of all webpages within a site is recorded with one URL in each line. It’s also uploaded to the root directory of a website and is used by Yahoo to be informed of all the pages within a website for easier indexation.

Why SEO Services Should Include them in Your Site?

SEO service providers should make sure your site has got some fundamental elements in place so that they could more easily be entirely indexed and ranked highly. As indexation and number of pages are important in the SEO score of your site, using sitemap could have sort of indirect impact on the search engine ranking of your site/blog. SEO services, should also consider this either they are part of the service they announce or not.