Site map is a term coined and used for a site to show a list of important pages of a site, To avoid the homepage or any other page look cluttered sitemaps are created and connected to an important page of the site, Mostly it is connected to the homepage of a site,

There has been various debates across various forums whether a sitemap is essential for a site, As an opinion of search engine genie we suggest adding a site map to your site, Site maps help in various ways both for visiting search engines and regular visitors,

Some benefits of sitemaps on a site,

1. Users wont get lost of your site if you run a big site, If you connect your important pages in your site map users can navigate easily to any page listed in the sitemap and return to the main page without loosing their path,

2. For large sites it is difficult to navigate deeper and deeper, A good sitemap prevents this and users can navigate to any page without getting lost, Also most of the inner pages will come more closer to the homepage and this helps effectively in good navigation,

3. Not all search engine crawlers crawl a site deeper and deeper, Some crawlers like yahoo slurp tend to go into a site only to a certain extent, For crawlers like slurp pages shouldnt be buried deeper, A sitemap will combat this problem, When a site map is used pages will come closer to top level and this help yahoo's crawler slurp to reach inner pages too,

4. Also suppose if a site has javascript menus, DHTM menus and other menus that are not search engine friendly a sitemap will definitely help in better crawling of a site, A sitemap with text only links to inner pages is very much useful,

5. Sitemaps also help in better spreading of a pagerank, Pagerank google's trademark algorithm

Site maps are good for large sites as well as small sites, Hope our tips on sitemaps will give your site a better exposure to search engines,

SEO Blog team,

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