Site map helps search engines find out all the pages present on a website. Site Map helps search engine crawlers crawl pages easily. Site Map also has the option to rank pages. This is very useful for the web master to let the search engine know the priority for each page.
The web master can easily inform the search engine which are the important pages on the website and which has the least importance. Sitemaps should be placed in the root folder.
http://www.examplesite.com/sitemap.xml
Another benefit of Site Maps is that they can also inform the search engine the time and date when the page was last updated. A common site map would contain:
- Page URL
- Last Updated (Time & Date)
- Priority
- Update Frequency (Daily, Weekly, Monthly or Yearly)
Site maps are mostly created in XML. However, other formats like Python are accepted depending on the search engine feasibility.