What is a Sitemap?

Do you remember the Nickelodeon TV show "Dora the Explorer"? It was all about Dora and her crew - Boots the monkey, Backpack, and Map - going on wild adventures, cracking puzzles, and lending a hand to whoever needed it. Along the way, she would teach basic Spanish and how to problem solve, all while preventing Swiper (a fox) from foiling her good intentions. In this post, I'm gonna break down the idea of a sitemap by comparing it to Dora's escapades.

Dora the Search Engine

Let's write an episode where Dora wants to become the world's greatest tour guide. She aims to do this by knowing everything she can about every city in the world (She's pretty ambitious). She puts a notebook in her backpack, grabs the map, and tells Boots to put his boots on and embarks on her adventure

In each new city she visits, she uses the street signs to help her navigate to different parts of the city. She takes notes of everything she sees - buildings, places to eat, the best movie theaters. But sometimes there are parts of the city that don't have street signs. How will she learn about those parts? Luckily for her, some places have a sentient map, similar to her friend The Map, that give more information about places to eat, the best gas stations, and beautiful landmarks. This makes it so much more easy for Dora to gather information about a place!

Dora goes on to explore the entire world, taking notes about each city as she goes (she has a big notebook). She returns home and sets up a shop where she spends the rest of her life being the best tour guide in the world. The United Nations go on to give her the exclusive privilege to be called a "World Guide" instead of a "Tour Guide" for all the incredible work she did.

Okay... but Dora is just a Cartoon.

Yeah, Dora is a cartoon, but I've learned a lot from cartoons. Looney Toons taught me that trying to catch a rabbit will end in pain, SpongeBob taught me that squirrels from Texas have a southern accent, and The Emperor's New Groove taught me that I should think carefully before I go pulling any levers.

In our fake Dora episode example, Dora gives us an idea of what a search engine does. Search engines are like tour guides, but for the internet. They try to learn as much as they can about each website on the internet. They can find out some information on their own if the website has links to other pages of the website, but a sitemap can make it easier for the search engine to understand the structure of a website and index its pages more effectively. Sitemaps can also include additional information about each URL, such as when it was last updated or how often it changes. This helps search engines prioritize crawling and indexing the most important pages of a website.

Conclusion

I know that this analogy is a very superficial example of what a sitemap is, but I wrote it to help me understand more about what a sitemap is, it's role in a website, and how it helps improve SEO. I plan to edit it as I learn more, and I imagine the fake episode might get a little ridiculous, but hopefully you were able to learn something as well.

Thanks for reading, you've earned this: 🍪