What is Site Map?
The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for crawling. A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement robots.txt, a URL exclusion protocol.

Sitemaps are particularly beneficial on websites

* where some areas of the website are not available through the browsable interface, or
* where webmasters use rich Ajax or Flash content that is not normally processed by search engines.

The webmaster can generate a Sitemap containing all accessible URLs on the site and submit it to search engines. Since Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask use the same protocol now, having a Sitemap would let the biggest search engines have the updated pages information.

XML Sitemap format
The Sitemap Protocol format consists of XML tags. The file itself must be UTF-8 encoded. (Sitemaps can also be just a plain text list of URLs. They can also be compressed in .gz format.)

Examples:
A sample Sitemap that contains just one URL and uses all optional tags is shown below.














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