Briefly, a sitemap is the map of your site. This should have one page where you should include the structure of your site, its sections as well as the links between them. They are seen as a vital way of communication with search engines. In robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to include and which pages to exclude from indexing, whereas in your site map you guide search engines about the main categories, sub-categories and products in an orderly fashion. Complex sites with thousands of products need a well designed site map to enable site visitor understand the whole site in nut shell. You may create a HTML site map for the site visitors and an XML map for robots of search engines.

According to Sitemaps.org -

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support Sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the Sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata. 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.

The webmaster can generate a Sitemap containing all accessible URLs on the site and submit it to search engines. Since Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask use the same protocol now, having a Sitemap would let the biggest search engines have the updated pages information. The search engine submission process for your sitemap is very straightforward: once you have created the sitemap, you need to upload it to your site and notify search engines.

From a search engine optimisation perspective there are a number of benefits for using a Sitemap:

• Your website gains easier navigation and better visibility from search engines.
• You get the opportunity to have your content changes indexed faster. Through the sitemap you basically inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site.
• A Sitemap gives you more freedom regarding your relation to external links, which usually have the role of bringing search engines to your site.
• It can be of help with accidentally broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other ways.
• It is of high importance for new sites to have a Sitemap: it speeds the process of indexing pages.
• It is of great help in classifying your site content better. Although it does not mean the search engines will necessarily classify a page as belonging to a particular category or as matching a particular keywordonly because of your sitemap, there is an increased likelihood that they would.

Using a sitemap is of great importance for both humans and spiders (such as GoogleBot). As mentioned above, it makes it user friendly for humans and easier for spiders to ‘see’ it.

View my site map: HTML XML