A site map, or sitemap, is a list of pages on your website, provided for both users and web crawlers. XML site maps are used for search engines, while HTML site maps are helpful for website visitors.
It is important to create a site map for your site, not only so that your users can easily find all of the information they are looking for, but also so that search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! can thoroughly crawl and index your site. Occasionally, search engine crawlers, or bots, can completely miss pages on your site. This happens when a page is not included in the main navigation system, or when there are no internal links pointing to that page. If a page is overlooked when your website is crawled, then it is not indexed, and it won’t be included in search results.
How will a potential customer be able to find you if your pages aren’t appearing in search results? Site mapping is imperative for every website. You can employ the very best SEO tactics on your site, but without a site map to tell the search engines about your pages, they won’t even rank at all.
