Types of Sitemaps in SEO

What is a Sitemap?

A sitemap is a file that provides information about pages, URLs, videos and other files that are present on a website. A sitemap also tells the crawler which files are important on a website.

There are two types of sitemaps:

• HTML Sitemaps
• XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps are further divided into the following types:

• Image Sitemaps
• Video Sitemaps
• News Sitemaps
• Mobile Sitemaps

1) HTML Sitemap

An HTML Sitemap is for the users. It helps visitors navigate across the website easily.

The following is a screenshot of an HTML Sitemap:

2) XML Sitemap

It helps bots to crawl the website in a better way. It also helps them understand which are the most important URLs in a site.

The following is a screenshot of an XML Sitemap:

<lastmod>, <changefreq> & <priority> are a few tags which can be included in an XML Sitemap:

• The <lastmod> tag carries the date of the last modification of the file. The <lastmod> tag should always be in the format of YYYY-MM-DD
  

• The <changefreq> tag tells the crawler how frequently the page is changing. 

One of these values – always, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly should be present in <changefreq> tag.

• <priority> value can range from 0.0 to 1.0.

The priority tag is used to signal the importance of individual pages to Google & other search engines

In this case, 1 is the highest and 0 is the lowest

If the <priority> value is not set for a particular page then by default the value is 0.5.

Check out this video to know more about sitemaps.

Types of XML Sitemaps

2.1) Image Sitemap:

• An image sitemap is for images.
• Having an image sitemap helps images get featured in Google Image Search
• <image:image> and <image:loc> tags are mandatory tags for an image sitemap
• <image:caption>, <image:title>, <image:title> and <image: geo_location > are optional tags for an image sitemap
• The following is a screenshot of an image sitemap:

2.2) Video Sitemap:

• Similar to the Image Sitemap, a Video Sitemap helps videos get featured in SERPs
• It helps bots better understand video content
• <url>, <loc>, <video:video>, <video:thumbnail_loc>, <video:title>, <video:description>, <video:content_loc> and <video:player_loc> are mandatory tags for a video sitemap
• Here is a screenshot of  Video Sitemap

2.3) News Sitemap:

• • This sitemap is compulsory for news websites
  • News Sitemaps cannot contain articles which are published more than 2 days priorly
  • News Sitemaps cannot contain more than 1000 URLs
  • If there are more than 1000 URLs, break these URLs into multiple sitemaps and use a sitemap index file

• Having a news sitemap helps articles get featured in the “News Section” of Google SERPs

2.4) Mobile Sitemap:

• According to John Muller, there is no need for Mobile Sitemap for a mobile-friendly website
• A Mobile Sitemap is only required if you have a specially formatted version designed for mobile devices