Site map 309
Site map
A site map of what links from the English Wikipedia's Main Page.Sitemap of GoogleA site map (or sitemap) is a list of
pages of a web site accessible to
crawlers or users. It can be either a
document in any form used as a
planning tool for web design, or a web
page that lists the pages on a web site,
typically organized in hierarchical
fashion. This helps visitors and search
engine bots find pages on the site.While some developers argue that site
index is a more appropriately used
term to relay page function, web
visitors are used to seeing each term
and generally associate both as one and
the same. However, a site index is
often used to mean an A-Z index that
provides access to particular content,
while a site map provides a general
top-down view of the overall site
contents.XML is a document structure and
encoding standard used, amongst many
other things, as the standard for
webcrawlers to find and parse
sitemaps. There is an example of an
XML sitemap below (missing link to
site). The instructions to the sitemap
are given to the crawler bot by a
Robots Text file, an example of this is
also given below. Site maps can
improve search engine optimization of
a site by making sure that all the pages
can be found. This is especially
important if a site uses a dynamic
access to content such as Adobe Flash
or JavaScript menus that do not
include HTML links.They also act as a navigation aid [1] by providing an overview of a site's content at a single glance.