Site map is basically model design of website content. Its purpose is to provide assistance both to search engines and users to easily navigate through the site. In essence, this is the hierarchical list of pages including links organized as per their topic, organization chart, or via XML document that is providing instructions to crawl bots of search engines. Site map can be spelled too as “sitemap”.
Digital Map for Visitors
When web visitors are using sitemap, it is simply a plain HTML file. This includes listing of the major pages to the site.
In search engines on the other hand, site map is otherwise called as sitemap.xml file.
This is helping search engine crawlers to index the pages of the site. While the sitemap doesn’t provide guarantee that each and every single page of a website would be crawled, it is recommended by major search engines.
Support for Scripting Programs
Site maps are a lot more important for websites that are using JavaScript or Adobe Flash menus that don’t have any HTML links in it. Google has introduced Google Sitemaps which is designed to help the Web Crawlers in finding dynamic pages which were missed oftentimes. Bing and several other search engines have followed and supported this protocol as well.