Sitemaps for your users and for search engines
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What Is a Sitemap & Why Does Your website Need One?
A sitemap is a file that lists all the important pages on your website.
It acts as a directory for search engine crawlers (and for users, depending on the format) to help them easily navigate your website. Also to ensure they understand your website’s architecture and the relationships between the pages.
Here are the two main types of sitemaps:
XML sitemap: A sitemap that’s used by search engine crawlers to discover pages. Which contributes to your overall SEO performance as it can be registered or discovered by search engines.
HTML sitemap: A sitemap that looks like a standard webpage with all important pages listed to help users easily navigate your website.
XML sitemap
These site maps are usually defined by a script, that walks over your pages and then builds the results into a xml file, which can be placed in the root of your website.
Some hosting companies control panel can offer tooling, or sometimes, your CMS may provide options to produce the file.
If you need a service to make a xml file for you, then you should check out https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
HTML sitemap
An HTML sitemap is a great feature to make sure that users can discover your content.
Mostly these pages are built by hand or can be scripted depending on how your site is built.
Sitemap cross-submission with robots.txt
You can make your xml sitemap discoverable from within your sites robots.txt file.
The robots.txt file is used to allow or disallow search engine crawlers from directories within your website.
However you can define your sitemap.xml, all you need to do is add a line that includes sitemap: then your domain and name of the sitemap.xml file.
sitemap: https://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml