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Learn about the different kinds of website sitemaps and the purpose behind them. Know when RSS feed files sometimes can replace XML sitemap files, and why you might still want to create a HTML sitemap for your website.

Ever since Google create "Google sitemaps", which later got renamed to XML sitemaps, the world has seen an ever growing number of sitemap formats for websites. No longer is it enough to create HTML sitemaps for your websites, you also need XML sitemaps, image sitemaps, video sitemaps, sitemaps for mobile content and that is only the beginning!

This article will summarize the format of most popular sitemap file kinds and give you the necessary information to determine your website sitemap needs!


HTML Sitemaps:
These are old school sitemaps. You create them to:

 
• Help your visitors navigate your website.
• Motivate search engines to follow links deep into your website.

Remember that while these files are called HTML sitemaps, you can infact generate them using any program or server-side language. It is the output content that has to be in HTML or XHTML. This way both internet browsers used by real humans and search engine crawlers can benefit from them.

If you have many pages in your website, you may want to either:

 
• Only list the most important website "hubs" and pages.
• Create a multi-page HTML sitemap keeping each to 100 links or below. If you need this, check this sitemap generator tool.

XML Sitemaps:
The name "XML sitemaps" was decided by Google and other search engines to represent their shared XML sitemaps protocol. Originally developed by Google, other search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and ASK quickly followed to support this new format. With this sitemap file type, you basicly submit to search engines a complete list of all the URLs in your website that you want crawled. If your sitemap generator tool supports it, the XML sitemaps protocol also allows you to add things such as importance priority values for all URLs.

While it started simple like described above, Google has now expanded upon XML sitemaps protocol to include:

• News Sitemaps
• Image Sitemaps
• Video Sitemaps
• Mobile Sitemaps
• Code Sitemaps

These formats are currently not supported by other search engines such as Yahoo, Ask and Bing. However, the purpose of these formats are easy to understand. If for instance you have a website that is rich on images, say a websites featuring wallpapers or photographies, creating an image sitemap will help them getting indexed. If you want to create above XML sitemap formats, you can with A1 Sitemap Generator.


ATOM and RSS Feed Files:
Many search engines such as Google and Yahoo will allow you to submit feeds from forums, blogs and similar. The advantage is you do not have to create an XML sitemap file, but instead can use auto-generated feed files. Do remember though that feeds not always contain all URLs in your website, forum or blog. Instead they often only contain new posts. Feeds work as an okay fallback solution if you can not create and upload an XML sitemap of your website.

The good thing about using an HTML sitemap is that it gives your website visitors an easier time to search for specific content on your site. Similarly, an HTML sitemap allows your web pages to get indexed by the search engines. It also helps up the ranking of your site on the search engine, depending on how the HTML sitemap is created. An RSS feed is a source of RSS updates for a given website. News websites often have RSS feeds from which users can be sent news headlines as they are published.

I have a wordpress website and they had a plug-in I used to create my sitemap.  After I created the sitemap I noticed a slight bump in my search engine rankings.  I guess the web crawlers prefer when I site has an XML sitemap.

Google supports xml sitemaps and rss feeds as they are easier format for google to crawl and index, but yahoo prefer a simple notepad file containing all your urls.

I want to suggest xml sitemaps,
Google support them.