Sitemap, on its simplest meaning is a map of your site. It is where you show the structure of your site, the sections and subsections and the links between them. Sitemaps makes navigation easier both for your user and the search engine. Through sitemaps, you are able to communicate with the search engine robots. In robots.txt, you tell your search engines what part of your site you would like to include or not include on their index. Through site map, you tell search engines where you would like them to go.

A very good function of a site map is it helps non-HTML websites to gain visibility on the search engines. Sites with java scripts, flash pages and other non-text html pages are very hard to be seen by the search engines but with the help of a site map, search engines find them easier.

An updated sitemap also offers the opportunity to tell the search engines immediately about changes on your site. It is found that new pages are indexed more faster when you have a sitemap than when you don’t.

Generating sitemaps.

There are two ways to generate a site map, you can download and install a free sitemap generation tool or you can generate one online. The first one may be difficult but it is most recommended if you want to take control of the output. If you want to use a readily available sitemap generator tool online, you can use Google sitemap generator instead. Google also lists links of some third party programs and online tools for sitemap generation which you can find here: http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html

If you want to get the important pages of your sites to be indexed, you need to help the search engine robots find them and creating a sitemap for your site will do the trick. Although sitemap does not help your site rank on the search engines, creating one assures you that every optimized pages of your site are listed and indexed.