What is a SiteMap ?
On this article I will explain what a Sitemap is and what is it used for. You can guess that a sitemap is a Map of your Site of course, and that definition is from me to explain in the simplest way. According to Wikipedia, a sitemap is defined as:
The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling.
Like the definition above, a sitemap informs the search engines about the available urls that can be crawled on your website. Some websites need sitemaps because their website might not be liked by the Google Bots or the Bots might have trouble indexing your website. But this is not the case all the time.
A sitemap makes your website extremely easy to be accessible by search engines. It is usually an XML file.
If you have a flash website, your content is not going to be indexed by the search engines because they can’t see the links. You can add a sitemap linking to those links and tell the Search Engines that you have those urls on your website so they can come and index them. If your entire content is in flash, then this is not a good option for you, but you can create extra html files to be seen by the search engines.
You can create a sitemap very easily online or with an program that you would download it to your personal computer.
If you are using a ready to go system, check to see if they already have an module for it. For example the Wordpress ready to go system has many plug-ins created by different programmers to generate a sitemap automatically.
