In todays post we will be discussing what a Sitemap is and why it is important.

What is a website Sitemap?

In a simplest sense a Sitemap is a page on a website that serves as your master archive for every page ever produced on your website that you want the general public to access.  Normally you want a simple HTML link in the footer of your website that shows up on every page.

What is the value of this Sitemap?

First off, this gives your designer more creative flexibility to do more creative navigation options that could have elements like Flash or Javascript that can cause some difficulties for the search engine spiders when they go to navigate your website to look for new webpages.  With this in place the search engine spider is always one link from your entire website.  The less you make the indexing spider work the better in our opinion.  Second, if you choose to move to a different web domain or you change your URL structure you will have a reference that will help you make a proper 301 redirect (we will cover these later) so you do not lose any valuable Google PageRank.

Anything else?

I have read some statistics that 10-15% of web surfers still look for the sitemap when they come to a new website to find what they are looking for so they see this as a time saver as well.   Saving time for a visitor coming too your website is always a good idea.

-Dal