A Sitemap is a hierarchical representation of web site architecture in document or design form. It facilitates visitors as well as search engines with the easiest way for finding particular pages on a web site. Sitemap provides crawler a better way to reach different corners of web site and understand the information thoroughly. For visitors it gives them a top down view of your complete web site for quick information.

Knowing the dual importance of sitemap for visitors as well as search engines, generating sitemaps and how to use them effectively becomes absolutely necessary for any search engine optimization project.

Sitemap can be created in a number of acceptable formats such as XML, ROR, text based and html. If your website content changes frequently or some of your pages are more important than others, you can tell these things to search engine crawlers via these sitemap.

After generating the sitemap you must place it under root directory of your html server on the same host where you have hosted your website. Further you can submit your sitemap to search engines and create a entry of your sitemap location in robots.txt file to see the results.