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The notion of sitemap is not a new one neither for search engine optimization consultants nor beginners in SEO. However, it looks like not all online businesses understand the importance of having a sitemap as part of search engine marketing strategy.

As the name suggests, a sitemap is a map of your site. It is a one page structure of your site, which includes its sections as well as the links between them. Sitemaps represent the way a sitemap communicates with search engines. Just as through robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to include and which pages to exclude from indexing, through your sitemap 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. Therefore, it is advisable for you to create an HTML site map for the site visitors and an XML map for robots of search engines.

According to Sitemaps.org :

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 optimization perspective there are a number of benefits for using a Sitemap:

• Your website gains easier navigation and better visibility from search engines.
• Speed up the process of indexing the pages of your new website.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 keyword only because of your sitemap, there is an increased likelihood that they would.

Sitemaps are given a high importance by both humans and spiders (such as GoogleBot). That is because it makes it user friendly for humans and because it is easier for spiders to “see” it.