Sitemaps are a crucial tool for webmasters, enabling them to inform search engines about the pages on their websites that are available for crawling. They play a significant role in enhancing the discoverability and indexing of website content.
In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site and additional metadata about each URL (last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is relative to other URLs in the site). This structured data helps search engines crawl a website more intelligently by providing detailed information about the site’s structure and content.
Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.