Importance of Sitemap ?

[wctumesh]

There are numerous search engine optimization tips and tricks that help in optimizing a site but one of them, the importance of which is often overlooked is sitemaps. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are simply a map of your web site

On a single web page you display the structure of your site, its sections, the hyperlinks between them, etc. Sitemaps make navigating your site simpler and having an updated sitemap on your site is beneficial both for your users and for search engines like google. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines. In your robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your web site to exclude from indexing, in your sitemap you tell the search engines exactly where you'd like them to go.

Sitemaps are not a novel idea. They have always been a part of best web design practices but with the usage of sitemaps by search engines, now they have become a lot more important. However, it's important to make a clarification that if you are looking at sitemaps primarily from a SEO point of view, you cannot use the traditional sitemap only (although currently Yahoo! and MSN still adhere to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special XML format that's totally different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.

One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer's clear - one is for humans, the other is for bots (for now mainly Googlebot but it's reasonable to anticipate that other crawlers will join the club soon). In that relation it's important to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In 'Introduction to Sitemaps', Google explicitly states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalties for your web site.