Like the name implies, a sitemap is a webpage or two that contains links to all the relevant pages of your website. It is a lot like a map. It should show how your website is laid out and how a visitor could move around your site from one section to another.

A sitemap well serve as your all-in-one webpage for search engine spiders to index the rest of your Web pages. Search engine spiders will easily be able to move through your website and measure each page in terms of its importance for keywords. Often times, a crawler will arrive at your main page and look for a sitemap to see how well your website is set up. You should link to your sitemap from your home page.

An intuitive internal link building strategy is important if you want your website to rank highly in the search engines. Crawlers are getting smarter and keyword rich links that flow smoothly (without any broken links!) will lead to you getting a higher ranking in the search engines. Well designed websites are seen as more important by search engines than badly designed websites.

You should not only put in a site map for SEO and Search Engine crawlers. There are some website users out there that prefer sitemaps to help them navigate their way around websites. You may be inadvertently losing customers if you leave a sitemap out. If a web user cannot find what they are looking for, they will often go to the sitemap to try and save time.

If you do not have a sitemap on your website, then you are doing yourself a disservice. You should put in a sitemap in order to help you with your Search Engine Optimization and to help those customers who are struggling to find the right information on your website. A sitemap would be useful for them.