Imagine walking into a large library with thousands of books spread over several floors and different areas. A site map for a website works in a similar way to the library map, which shows you where to find which books. In a library, you can often find maps at central locations that identify the various areas: non-fiction here, novels there, magazines upstairs on the second floor, and so on.
Transferred to a website, a site map gives you a clear overview of how the website is structured — which pages there are, how they are linked to each other, and how you can quickly find the information you're looking for. Just as the library map helps you not have to search for the right book on every shelf, a site map on a website helps you not have to go through each page individually to find what you need.
When a site map is available as an XML file, it's like using a detailed, digital version of the library plan for administration. This digital version is not necessarily visible to visitors, but in this case it helps search engines like Google — to orient themselves which content is important and how it is organized so that they can better assign it to a category area, index it quickly and present it to users in search results.
As a rule, the route to the site map of a website looks like this www.xyz.de/sitemap.xml - for example, here is the sitemap of our website https://www.marketer-ux.com/sitemap.xml
The XML sitemap is structured in a similar way to a table of contents for a website and consists of url Elements that each represent a web page. Here is an overview of the typical components of a url Elements in a site map:
<loc>: The absolute path to the URL.<lastmod>: The date the URL was last modified.<changefreq>: Indicates how often the content of the URL is expected to be updated, with values such as “always”, “daily”, “monthly”, etc.<priority>: Shows the relative importance of the URL on the website, with values from 0.0 to 1.0.
The site map is included in a urlset Day included, that all url Tags include.
