The importance of XML sitemap in SEO

When it comes to improve your rankings, a XML sitemap can be a really good partner. This protocol helps Google and other main search engines to easily understand your website structure while crawling it. It was first introduced by Google in 2005, with MSN and Yahoo offering their support to the protocol a year later. Sitemaps are known as URL inclusion protocols as they advise search engines on what to crawl. It comes in opposition to robots.txt files that are an exclusion protocol as it tells search engines what not to crawl.

The website Blue Corona made a good comparison between a XML sitemap and a blueprint for a house.

Think of your website as a house and each page of your site as a room. You can think of a XML Sitemap like a blueprint for your house and each web page were a room, your XML Sitemap would be a blueprint—making it easy for Google, the proverbial home inspector of the web—to quickly and easily find all the rooms within your house

Benefits of having a XML sitemap

Having a sitemap on your site passes more data to search engines. So it also:

• Lists all URLs from your site. And this includes pages that would not have been foundable by search engines
• Gives engines page priority and thus crawl priority. You can add a tag on your XML sitemap saying which pages are the most important. Bots will thus first focus on this priority pages.
• Gives temporal information. You can also include two other optional tags that will pass extra data to search engines to help them crawl your website. The first one, “lastmod’ informs them when a page last changed. The second one, “changefreq” tells how often a page is likely to change.
• Gives you information back from the Google Webmaster Central. You can access googlebot activity for instance.