What Is SiteMap?

The sitemap is a very important and necessary component in each website. In short, the sitemap is an index page of your website, which offers links to all pages of your website. These links are categorized and organized in hierarchical form, which makes finding them very easy. In case the visitor of your website cannot find the needed page, he or she should refer to the sitemap. Moreover, the sitemap helps the search engines to index your website. Providing text-based links to key pages makes the sitemap a great way to be found by the search engines. Some of you probably know that Google's Webmaster Guidelines include multiple references to sites maps, which mean that site maps must be important.


When SEO was in its infancy, getting back links to a site was the most important factor. In fact, many books and articles written on the subject will still tell people that getting back links is the only proper way to optimize a website. Back links with proper anchor text, of course.

After search engine optimization has a chance to mature, SEO specialists became aware that using only back links is not at all the best way to optimize a site. In fact, if an SEO is only creating back links, the site is not getting optimized.

In On page site optimization, there are techniques and tools that are related to your own website and in OFF page optimization, there are items which are related to the other websites. In On page the old technique was Meta Tag Optimization, appropriate content, Alt tag optimization, proper navigation for the website and much more activities through which changes were made to the website, itself. In OFF page optimization, only back links were created.

Today, optimization is a little bit different. While using the old techniques are still appropriate, creating a Sitemap can be added to the list. Sitemap is something that came in existence a few years ago.
A Sitemap is a graphical representation of the architecture of a website. There are two kinds of site maps. The first is used to assist visitors to a site to navigate the site and the second is done in XML. XML Sitemaps, usually called Sitemap with a capital “S”, are used by Goggle to gather information about the site.

Sitemap is especially important if your site:

• Has dynamic content
• Has pages with a lot of flash or AJAX
• Is new and doesn’t have many links
• Has a lot of archived pages that are not linked well, or not at all

The use of Sitemap becomes doubly important if the site has pages that can only be accessed through user entry. Sitemap will assist web crawlers in finding and accessing the pages.