What is a Sitemap and why should I have one?

Many experts agree that a sitemap is a must for every website, blog, or a web directory. Often you will see that there is a little link on the front page of a website that is labeled Sitemap. So, what is a Sitemap? Basically, it is a graphical representation of the structural and hierarchical linkage of a web site.

Sitemap is something which came in existence a few years back. People thought it is a tool through which they can optimize their websites. In fact sitemap is an easy tool through which a site owner can inform search engines about the pages of their websites. Through sitemap people can create an index of the pages of their websites which are required for crawling by search engines.

A sitemap can be created in XML format. This page will list the pages of the websites along with some Meta data for each of the URLs which is listed in sitemap. These data can contain Change frequency, Last modification Time, and the priority of the page. Due to all these data, search engines can crawl more intelligently.

Many major Search Engines like the idea and recommends to have it on every website. Google has stated the same thing in their Webmaster tools. This is a clear indication how important a sitemap is for a website.

In its simplest terms, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.

Google also says:

Sitemaps provide additional information about your site to Google, complementing our normal methods of crawling the web. We expect they will help us crawl more of your site and in a more timely fashion, but we can’t guarantee that URLs from your Sitemap will be added to the Google index. Sites are never penalized for submitting Sitemaps.

Sitemaps need not be just a series of links in a tabular form. You can also provide details for each section and sub-section through descriptive text. Sitemap is useful just because it contains all the information regarding all the pages of the websites at a single page. Hence, search engines can gather all the information regarding the website from a single page and due to this they crawl each page of the websites regularly.