No one can deny the fact that today search engines rule the Web World. Search engines facilitate in locating the relevant websites for which the URLs are unknown. To have a successful business online, it has become the need to be ranked in major search engines. No business these days can flourish without the consideration of search engines as it helps in bringing your business in limelight of millions of users. There are several tricks and techniques that are used by SEOs to draw the attention of search engines towards the particular website. Search engines works upon several algorithms and index the website based upon it. The web spider primarily crawls upon sections like Meta tags, title description to search in for the keyword(s) put in by the user. One of the major sections being crawled by spiders and that makes the website indexed in search engines is "sitemap".

Sitemap, as the name suggests, is the map for a website. Just as a map helps you to find your way on a geographical plane, in a similar way, a sitemap makes the navigation of a site easier. A sitemap is a complete overview of the website displaying all the major sections and sub categories of the site on a single page. Site map make the website more user friendly as the user does not have to browse through the whole site, click by click, in order to locate for the particular information. A sitemap, in such a case, will direct the user straightaway to the desired webpage by providing a link for the same.

A sitemap also reduces the reliance of the website on external links to be indexed. Not only external links, a sitemap also helps to correct errors in the internal links, for instance, correcting a Meta tag that may mislead the search engines to orphaned pages.

Sitemap is not a new concept in the field of website development. The section has always been a part and a necessary element of website design. However, its popularity has increased tremendously with search engines considering this as an important element in site optimization.

To achieve the dual purpose of sitemaps, i.e. both navigation and optimization, it is necessary for you to have both XML and HTML format for your sitemap. While XML format will enhance the visibility of the website by making it easy for web crawlers to find and index it, HTML format on the other hand, makes it user-friendly. Incase you have indexed all the pages of your website with Google, you need not have XML sitemap. Also, if you are still left with a few pages that are to be indexed, you can emphasize them in your sitemap to be indexed by the web crawlers.

Before designing the sitemap page, it is vital that the programmer guide search engines those pages that you wish to be indexed and also the parts on the website that you want to be excluded. Moreover, it is necessary when the site is being redesigned, the section of site map should be updated too so that the user can browse all through the latest sections being added or restructure in the website. Sitemaps are a way of communicating with the search engines. That is to say, a sitemap section makes a site optimized and thereby definitely contributes to the increased profits of an organization by improving its visibility.

Nonetheless, there are many search engines that do not recognize sitemaps as yet and ask for a stripped-down version of sitemaps from webmasters. But considering the prominence of sitemaps in all the major search engines, it plays an imperative role in search engine optimization.