Sitemap is basically the index of your website. It consist the title and link of each page. A website for which search engine optimization is properly done must have sitemap. It helps the search engine to evaluate and rank the website. There are two types of sitemaps. Both have identical importance but the XML Sitemap is more helpful regarding search engine optimization.

HTML Sitemaps

HTML sitemaps are for people. They can get an overview of the site and find the pages they need, just like roadmaps help you find your way around town. HTML sitemaps once were important for SEO, but they have been replaced by XML sitemaps. In terms of SEO, don’t worry too much about the HTML sitemap. Just make it useful for visitors. Here are some helpful tips:

Create a plain-text sitemap that lists the significant pages at your site. You don’t need to list every page, just the main pages. Place a plain-text link to the sitemap on the index page.

Google’s limit on links is 99. They’ve found that pages with hundreds of links have little value to users. If a page has more than 99 links, Google may lower its position. Don’t push this limit. It doesn’t mean that Google accepts 98 links, either. They don’t like long lists of links. People generally ignore such lists, so those pages get a lower rank.

If your sitemap needs more than 99 links, use several pages. You can divide your site maps by themes, which helps the search engine to classify your site’s theme.

XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps are also a list of files. However, the XML sitemap is written in XML format. It’s not meant to be read by people. It’s a long list of URLs, along with information about the files.

XML sitemaps have solved several problems. When websites began using roll-down menus, images for links, and Java, Ajax, or Flash for navigation, search engines often couldn’t follow the links, so those websites weren’t indexed. HTML sitemaps were fine for small sites with a few dozen pages, but it wasn’t feasible to make HTML sitemaps for sites with 500,000 pages. XML solved both of these problems. Webmasters can create an XML file that contains a list of all pages and feed that directly to the search engine’s index.

The major search engines agreed on a standard format for XML sitemaps. You can use the same XML sitemap for all major search engines. A number of tools can be used to create XML sitemaps. If you have fewer than 500 pages, use the free tool at XML-sitemaps.com. You can find a list of XML tools at Google Webmaster Tools. Once you’ve created the XML sitemap, submit it to the search engines:

For Google https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

For Yahoo! https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com

For Microsoft http://webmaster.live.com

XML sitemaps can hold up to 50,000 URLs in one file (and not more than 10MB in size). That’s sufficient for most sites. For very large sites, you can create an XML sitemap index file that points to sub pages. The limit is 50 million URLs.