Why use a Sitemap?

We want to use a sitemap for two reasons. One, to provide an overview to your website to your customers and Two, to help the web crawlers catalog your links. To help your viewers you can simply provide the standard sitemap html file that lists all your links (also called a traditional map). Or you can create a special XML file often capitalized as "Sitemap" that provides information to the search engine spiders (google documentation).

"Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site." - sitemap.org



http://www.example.com/
2005-01-01
monthly
0.8



The downside of using the XML Sitemap is that we are not listing anchor text to be used as keyword associations. So for modest sized websites we might prefer to use a simple html file that lists all your links with appropriate keyword anchor text. Another advantage to the html sitemap is that it levels a site to 2 or 3 levels.