A sitemap is an outline or map of the pages contained in a website.
Website Development Sitemaps: These visual sitemaps created for the design process, which are hierarchical structure charts. They are very important to the internal website planning process and map the priority of pages within the menus and structure of the website.
XML Sitemap: An XML sitemap is an online listing of all the url addresses of the pages in a website. They are specifically designed for search engines, like Google, which need to be able to find web pages anchored within a website. The XML sitemap acts as a roadmap for search engines to find, crawl and index all the pages on a website. These maps are important for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and can be submitted to search engines in order to start gaining ranking. Specifically, for websites that have a lot of content like a blog, where pages care constantly bumped further back into the website’s archive as new content is published. There are four major types of XML sitemaps – each dedicated to a different type of media: Image sitemaps, video sitemaps, news sitemaps, mobile sitemaps.