A sitemap is either a diagramatic or textual representation of the architecture of your website. It can be a simple webpage which contains all the links of your website organaized in their appropriate categories in a hierarchical manner. If your sitemap is well developed and easy to follow, it can greatly aid your visitors and also the search engine robots.

Just as you refer to a map to check your direction in the real world, a sitemap acts as a navigational map of your website. If your website is very large, it is quite possible that your visitors might get lost in your website. But if you have a well designed sitemap in place, then they can easily navigate their way through your website. Also your visitors will understand what your website is all about by looking at your sitemap, since all the sections and pages will be listed there. In this way instead of surfing through each page, they can simply go to whichever page they want through your sitemap thereby saving time.

Search engines simply love sitemaps, since they contain all the pages and sections on your entire website. So whenever search engine robots visit your sitemap page, they follow the links on your sitemap thereby indexing all the pages of your website. Sitemaps can also be very useful for flash and dynamic websites, which do not have an HTML extension and hence cannot be found by the search engines.

Some websites are very large and many search engines can have problems accessing all the pages on the site. Besides many search engines follow only a limited number of links on a website. Hence having a sitemap takes care of this issue, since all the links of that website can be found there. Aso, try putting your sitemap link on all your pages at a prominent location especially on your homepage. Google loves sitemaps so much that it has introduced “Google Sitemaps“. And now these sitemap protocols are also supported by MSN and Yahoo.

Having a proper and a well maintained sitemap makes your website well organized and uncluttered. You can easily get a sneak peek of your entire website at a glance. Whehever you want to add new pages or categories to your website, you easily fit it into the existing structure of your website. In this manner you can sort things out in the most relevant manner.

Hence if you consider the aforementioned reasons, then you would agree that a sitemap is extremely important, especially for a large website. In this way your website will become very user friendly and easily navigable for your users as well as the search engines.