What is the difference between xml and html sitemap
 

What is the difference between xml and html sitemap

HTML sitemap is well known by people especially by those people who are not engaged in internet marketing. This kind of sitemap is mainly used to help visitors of a website to find what they need conveniently or help the visitors clearly know the structure of a website.

XML sitemap is mainly used by webmasters to help search engines spiders to crawl their websites effectively. Most search engine spiders are trained to look for and identify if an XML based sitemap exists on a website. A good and comprehensive XML sitemap will surely help your website be indexed by search engines like Google more effectively.

A site map is a model of a website's content designed to help both users and search engines navigate the site. A site map can be a hierarchical list of pages (with links) organized by topic, an organization chart, or an XML document that provides instructions to search engine crawl bots.

XML is a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format which is both human-readable and machine-readable. It is defined by the W3C's XML 1.0 Specification and by several other related specifications, all of which is open standards.

HTML sitemap is used to list all hyperlinks of different sections and pages of your blog/website. These hyperlinks are normally listed hierarchically and they may provide description for each link. It is no doubt that adding a HTML sitemap to your blog/website will help your visitors navigate and find information easily. So HTML sitemap is primarily created for humans.

XML sitemap lists URLs (world wide web addresses) for your blog/website in a special format. See the table below for a XML Sitemap with one single UR

The difference between XML and HTML site map is that when we submit XML site map in webmaster tool it convert in to HTML site map and then it crawl it, but when we submit HTML site map their is no need to convert it, so it is very useful to crawl for crawler and it work fast.

xml: use for search engine bot
html: use for user point of view and strong internal linking .

A XML sitemap protocol is specifically intended for search engine spiders. At its root, XML is a file that includes all the behind the scenes activity on a web site. Not just the site’s main URL, but all the URLs within the site along with the associated metadata. This can include when the URL was last updated, how important it is, the average frequency changes occur, the URLs relation to the rest of the site, etc.

HTML is just a general overview of the site, just the pages and info a user needs to be concerned with. If you’re on a web site and you’re looking for the shopping cart or the ‘Contact Us’ page and can’t find it, you’d go to the sitemap and easily find it there. While this is geared towards the user, it can also help your search engine ranking because your site is user-friendly and catering to the site visitor.