How sitemap either XML sitemap or HTML sitemap helps in SEO
What is SEO and why it is important in online business?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO, is the process by which pages are optimized to increase their online presence in organic search ranking.
The effective SEO campaign creates a high organic ranking for the website on selected keywords/phrases.
An effective SEO campaign comprise following three points:
1) keyword research and analysis
2) Onsite optimization (Webpage optimization)
3) Offsite optimization(Social media optimization)
In keyword research and analysis we analyze and select keywords based on traffic, competition, and relevance.
Onsite optimization deals with changes made to the site itself. This involves making changes to the text content, architecture of the site, HTML code, and page layout.
Offsite optimization mainly involves increasing the quantity and quality of inbound links to the site.
How Sitemap helps in SEO process:
Search engines use your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site. Placing a site map on your business website not only helps your visitors to find information but also it is easy for search engine spiders to crawl your website thoroughly.
People can start SEO by making good sitemap for their website and submitting it on different search engine. By submitting this, you are telling search engine that you exist and what pages your site has to offer to them.
There are two types of sitemaps, HTML sitemap and XML sitemap.
HTML Sitemaps
In an HTML sitemap you can provides a useful directory of all the pages of your website.
HTML sitemap can be single HTML page that contains link of your website pages. With organized HTML sitemap visitor can easily find information or link that he wants, even on large website with lots of pages.
You can put the HTML site map link in the footer of your website.
In SEO point of view, search engine crawlers easily find your site and blissfully index all your pages that are in sitemap.
XML sitemap
XML sitemaps are created specifically for the search engines not for the human visitor. All of the most popular search engines including Google, Yahoo and Ask.com utilize XML sitemaps as part of their process for indexing the pages of a website.
A good XML sitemap is repository of pages i.e. the link of pages that your website has, how often those pages are updated, and when they were last modified. Here's an example of the XML you might include in your XML sitemap:
<url>
<loc>domainname/index.htm</loc>
<lastmod>2009-12-05</lastmod>
<changefreq>Daily</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
Description:
<loc> : is the webpage location
<lastmod> : when the page is last modified
<changefreq> : the frequency of content change in particular page
<priority> : priority of this page in relation to the other pages of our site
Creating HTML sitemap is too easy, just create the HTML page that contains links to all the pages in your site where as creating XML sitemap manually is tedious task. However, there are many great sitemap generators out there to help you automate this.
How Often Should I Submit My Sitemap?
No limitation by search engines, you can submit sitemap to search engines n number of times. If you create new pages on a regular basis, you may want to submit your sitemap more frequently.

