The importance of a site map on your website

“Can you just remind me the importance of having a site map on your web page, is it the spiders impact?”

As I answered this question today for someone on email, I thought I would share my comments on my blog just in case there are a few of you out there with the same question

The importance of having a site map is so that the search engines can “trawl” through your site easily.  It is like giving someone a map of the local town centre so that they know where all the shops are and can visit them all without missing any out.

It’s not essential as the search engines will certainly find your site eventually through external links to your site and be able to get their way round a site with simple and easy navigation but as it is free to submit, it doesn’t harm to possibly speed up the process.

Google’s site map facility can be found here and Yahoo’s can be found here.  You can do more but to be honest, these 2 are the main ones and spend the time on the others focusing on writing compelling copy for your website!

Hope that helps.