Is it necessary to have a sitemap on your website? The answer is no. Is it a good idea to have a sitemap on your website? The answer is yes. What is a sitemap? A sitemap provides a top-down view of your overall site contents. This is an easy way for webmasters to alert search engines about URL’s on their site that are available for crawling. A sitemap is an XML file that provides a listing of URL’s for a site. It also includes additional information about each URL. A sitemap allows web crawlers to crawl your site more intelligently and efficiently.

Google introduced XML sitemaps which enable web developers to publish lists of links from across their sites. This is beneficial to sites where webmasters use Javascript or Adobe Flash which are not normally crawled because they do not include HTML links.

The four biggest search engines Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask all support the same protocol so having a sitemap lets the big four have your updated page information.

XML sitemaps have replaced the older method of submitting to search engines. It is worth noting though that sitemaps supplement and do not replace the existing crawling mechanisms that search engines use. Also there is no guarantee that your web pages will be included in search engines but as I mentioned earlier you are providing web crawlers with a better, more comprehensive method of gathering information about your site.

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