20 October 2011
An overview of what a sitemap is and why you should always have one.

A site map is one page or sometimes a set of pages, which lists all, or most of the pages on a web site.

If your web site is small, consisting of only a few pages, you can have links to all these pages from one page - the site map.

On the other hand, if your site consists of hundreds of pages segregated into directories (hopefully!), the site map of your web site might run into 2 or more pages.

As the term suggests a site map is a map of the web site and can be a list of links or a more complex representation. However, my advice is to keep the site map as simple as possible.

All the websites we create have a site map, normally one that is accessible to the public and indexable by search engines through a menu link and then another XML version which is dedicated to search engines.

This second site map is probably just as important as the first, if not more important, because it is submitted to Google's Webmaster tools and allows Google to index a website quickly while also providing you with some very important information about your website and the navigational structure.

We have had occasion to create websites without a site map but these are generally websites that do not need to appear in the Google index because they are being promoted through Google's AdWords system or are simply informational websites that are dedicated to providing information to end users or are there simply for internal reference.

However, these are rare cases and we would ALWAYS recommend that a website have a site map.

Also, most of the projects we work on are quite small to start with so you might think 2what's the point of a site map?” when a website only contains 5 or say 10 pages. Well, as with all things in life, a website grows. Before you know it a website can have hundreds of pages. Also, if you translate the website into different languages this immediately duplicates the number of pages that the website has.

So, in short, you should always have a website site map to help you, your users and the search engines find their way around your website and find the resources they want because if they can't then they'll probably simply go elsewhere and that means lost potential business.