September 30, 2008 by Matt Thomas
A lot of people with websites think that an HTML sitemap will do, that they don’t really need a XML (aka Google) Sitemap. In a way they’re right of course, an HTML sitemap will do a perfectly decent job. There are however, a range of advantages to making the jump to XML that more than justify the hassle of doing so.
As we know, an HTML sitemap is merely a webpage consisting of a list of links to all of your site’s pages that a search engine can easily follow. An XML sitemap, on the other hand, is a file that provides search engines with particular information on which pages to crawl and how often – they’re not obliged to follow these directives, but they do tend to broadly obey them.
An XML sitemap greatly increases the chance that search engines will be able to locate all the URLs you want them to. You can also set priority pages and date your modifications to ensure your most important or most recent pages get searched more often. What’s more, Google Webmaster Central integrates all your sitemap data with your other site data, so you can get a proper overview of your site’s performance.
XML sitemaps are useful to everyone. However, if your site is new or not well linked it’s an all but essential tool for helping Google crawl your site, since your lack of links will be making it hard for Google to find and index all of your pages the traditional way. XML is also particularly useful if you have dynamic content on your pages, or if you use pages which aren’t easily discovered, for instance, pages using Flash.
So, in conclusion, an XML sitemap is not a must have by any means. However, it is a very useful way of keeping search engines informed about your site and how you would like it to be viewed. In an arena where you need every advantage you can get, it could be well worth the effort.
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