Most people seem to get confused during the selection process of a sitemap. People without proper knowledge really struggle to comprehend the best solution. Now, as a website development company and digital marketing service provider, we would state that the choice of your sitemap selection depends entirely on the nature of the website. However, there’s more than just the website type, here’s the difference between XML and HTML sitemaps.

What Exactly are XML & HTML Sitemaps?

Here, we will concentrate on two of the most popular technical phrases utilized in websites that not a lot of people are conscious of but usually encounter: XML and HTML. The acronyms stand for Extensible Markup Language and HyperText Markup Language.

A sitemap is a list of pages within a website that is simply accessible to search engine crawlers or online users. Sitemaps take the form of texts or web pages. What they do is make it more comfortable for both the search engines and online users to discover pages on the site itself.

Let’s say that your website now consists of 15 web pages and a user curious to know about your business history. Rather than manually digging through every single web page, a sitemap will make it simpler for the user to find the data that they are looking for.

Now, let’s dive more deeply into the two types of sitemaps which quite common:

HTML Sitemaps: This type of sitemap is utilized to sort of arrange various parts and pages of your blog or site by hyperlinks. They are typically placed in order of hierarchy, and normally incorporate a description of each link.

XML Sitemaps: On the opposite hand, XML sitemaps organize the sections of a webpage through URLs utilizing a unique format. If HTML sitemaps are readable by humans, XML sitemaps are ‘understood’ by search engines.

One of the most basic responsibilities of a website administrator is to upload an XML sitemap to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo which just goes to determine how beneficial knowledge of XML sitemaps would be. Not just would it enable your website to be listed promptly, but it additionally improves the SERP of your website when a particular keyword related to your site is searched for in these sites.

Differences, Advantages & Everything Else that You Want to Know regarding XML & HTML Sitemaps:

• To make it simple, the distinction between XML and HTML is that XML attends a regular format – so you can handle the sitemaps for certain search engines including Google, MSN, and Yahoo. As for HTML sitemaps, because they incorporate URLs or links to inner pages, there is no one standard that digital marketing experts follow.
• The great thing about employing an HTML sitemap is that it provides your website guests a more comfortable time to seek for particular content on your site. Furthermore, an HTML sitemap enables your web pages to get listed by the search engines. It additionally helps up the ranking of your site on the search engine, depending on how the HTML sitemap is generated.
• What about the advantages of an XML sitemap? This kind of sitemap is more beneficial if your website has dynamic content, if your web pages aren’t quickly identified by search engines, and if your site has a huge archive of content web pages which are not linked with each other.
• Whatever sitemaps you choose to use on your site, the great news is that you can make the job easier with the help of XML or HTML sitemap generators. Go online and look for a medium that will enable you to automatically produce the particular sitemap type that you require.

At the end of the day, the success of your site lies in the number of return prospects that you will get – and making it more comfortable for both online users and search engines to look for the data that they need through sitemaps is a step in the right direction.