Sitemaps play vital role in optimizing a site. It is basically a single page map, showing structure of your site, various sections and links between them. Navigating a site is easier with updated sitemap. It is not only helpful for users but also for search engines. In robots.txt you tell search engines which part of the site should be excluded from indexing. Sitemap tells search engines where you would like them to go.
Sitemaps have been always integral part of good web designing practices. However, from SEO perspective and adoption of leading search engines, sitemaps have gained more importance. Conventional sitemaps in standard HTML format are still followed by MSN and Yahoo search engines but leader of the lot, Google uses special (XML) format that is not same as the html version designed for human visitors. As such, you need to have two sitemaps, one for spiders and other for humans; for significant presence in Page Ranking (PR).
Sitemaps inform search engines about the changes and latest developments happening in your site. Such changes are indexed faster compared to the situation where you did not have sitemap. Reliance on external links for bringing traffic is reduced when you have submitted sitemap of your website to search engines.
Sitemap is also useful for classifying content of your website. Although, classifying a page according to a particular category or matching keyword is not done by search engines by simply following sitemap, but it is a good practice for SEO. As search engines improve their algorithm for sitemap indexing, importance of sitemap would increase accordingly.
You need to generate a sitemap for your site and upload it at your site. Next step is to inform search engine like Google about it. For generating sitemap, you may use online tool or download and install sitemap generator. Searching web can fetch you many free tools that can simplify your job. You can find links to several online sitemap generators, sitemap plugins to manage content etc. However, to have more control over output it is desirable to download and use Google sitemap generator. Verify the script used by the generator and follow instructions to configure and use it.
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