Google and other search engines offer webmasters a way to provide a little map (or we can say directions and locations) of their site to their Search Engine bots. It works like a normal map, but just for internal links on a website. This way, Search Engine bots can more effectively map out the entire website. Google uses an xml format while Yahoo supports a text format. There are various formats of sitemaps available. And I think the best is an html sitemap, since ALL Search Engines can read and understand. But no matter which format they use, the basics is essentially the same. It should provide links to different parts of your website. And you can submit these sitemap location to the Search Engines and Search Engines will make use of the information on these sitemaps to crawl your site.

I have complied a little list on why you should have a sitemap for your site.

1. Allows Search Engine to effectively map out and index your site. Help Search Engine bots navigate your site much easier.

2. Provide a way for Search Engine to check for new webpages on your site. Especially useful for huge sites with a lot of pages and links which can be difficult to find. However, there is no guarantee that they will even follow the new links.

3. For new websites, it provides a map for Search Engine to crawl. Submitting a sitemap can help get your site crawled faster, but this is of course, debatable.

4. It cost very little and there are a lot of free sitemap generators on the Internet. A lot of CMS comes with their own sitemap generator as well.

5. Gives you some control over what Search Engines can or should crawl.

I am using GSite Crawler to generate my sitemaps. It is free but can only work on Windows, so if you are a Mac or Linux user, you are out of luck. Remember, this is an software, not a script, so you need to install and then the program will crawl the site for you. You can configure which pages or file types to crawl and so on. There have available options and settings for you to choose from.

Do note that Sitemaps are not the answer to your poor Search Engine rankings. It’s to help Search Engine bots crawl your site. So if you are having problems with your rankings, at most, Sitemaps can help improve the way bots can crawl your site. It won’t help you get high rankings. For that, you should write solid content and get good incoming links to your webpages.