Sitemap in practice
A sitemap is a list of a website's pages designed for search engines. It is usually an XML file at an address like yoursite.com/sitemap.xml, which gives the address of each page and often the date it was last changed. Visitors do not see it, and it should not be confused with the old HTML «site map» meant for people.
Google finds pages mainly by following links; the sitemap also gives it a tidy, up-to-date list. For a five-page site with good internal links it changes little. It becomes important when there are many pages, when they change often or are poorly linked to each other: product pages, articles, holiday rentals, pages in several languages. It is a technical SEO tool, not a shortcut to climb the results.
An example: an online shop adds twenty new products every month. If the sitemap updates itself every time something is published from the CMS, Google discovers the new products without having to stumble on them by following a link.
Once it is ready, submit it in Google Search Console: there you can see how many pages have been read and which ones have problems. Mistakes to avoid: a sitemap stuck on pages from two years ago, addresses that return errors or redirect elsewhere, pages you do not want on Google included in the list, such as the cart, the members' area or test pages. Only the pages you would like to see in the results belong in the sitemap.
