Sitemap is a list of pages of a particular website access to search engine crawlers or users of the website at one place. It can be either in any form document used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists of all the pages on a web site and it’s typically organized in hierarchical format. This sitemaps helps the visitors and search engine bots to find pages on the site at a single place.

Sitemaps will helps to improve search engine optimization of a site by making sure that all the pages can be found in a single place. This is especially important if a site uses a dynamic access to content such as Adobe Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links. Most of the search engines will follow a finite number of links from a page, so if the number of links is very large, the site map may be required so that search engines and visitors can access all content on the site.

Sitemaps will give the hierarchical structure of the website by defining all the pages in a sole place.

XML Sitemaps & its Use in SEO

XML sitemaps have replaced the older method of “submitting to search engines” by filling out a form on the search engine’s submission page. Now a days no one is submitting the website to all of the search engines. Search engines only crawling the website XML sitemaps and indexing all the pages which are there in sitemap.

Google introduced Google Sitemaps, and it will take the XML sitemaps which is developed on the webpage. Directly we can login into Google Webmaster and submit the XML sitemap in it.

Yahoo & MSN will index the XML & txt sitemaps, so we can easily submit our website sitemap in Yahoo search engine.

Source: http://www.smarte-commerce.com