What are Sitemaps?
A sitemap is a visual representation of the architecture of a website used by webmasters to inform their visitors and search engines about the pages on their site.
Site maps provide an overview of the entire contents of a website. They are XML files that lists URLs for a site as well as the metadata for each URL. The metadata includes when the website was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is relative to other URLs on the site. They give search engines a greater ability to browse the site and find what is needed.
Web crawlers from search engines usually discover the pages they are looking for from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data as specific sitemap crawlers find the URLs in the sitemap and learn about them with the related metadata. Using sitemaps does not guarantee that webpages are included in the results of search engines, but it does provide hints for web crawlers that are browsing your site.
An example to help understand sitemaps better would be adding Adwords to your personal website. Say you have a blog and notice that you can make some money in the form of ‘pay-per-click’ ads if you include Google Adwords to your blog. Google uses the sitemap on your blog to search the words within and note how often it is updated in order to correlate the Adwords with what is on the site. If the theme of your blog is travel, Google crawls through the sitemap and decides to put an ad for an airline company or a hotel. Google also notices through the sitemap how often the blog is updated so they know to change the Adwords according to the newest entries on the blog. The quality of the sitemap is directly correlated to how well Google can target their Adwords.
Example of a Google site map:
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