There are many SEO tips and tricks that help in optimizing a site but one of those, the importance of which is sometimes underestimated is sitemaps. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site - i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, etc. The structure of your website plays a key role in obtaining search engine rankings. If your website structure is too complex, the search engines may not be able to find the pages you want ranked. Fortunately, there exists a sitemap strategy that will provide an open door to search engines for just about any website, ultimately increasing your odds for ranking success. The strategy is to provide a standard sitemap web page as well as a search engine sitemap to glean the benefits of both applications.

In simple terms, a Sitemap is an XML file that is full of your individual webpage’s URLs. It’s like an archive of every webpage in your website. This file should be easily discoverable in your site in order for search engine crawlers to stumble upon it.

What is a Sitemap for?
A Sitemap is usually used for the purpose of letting the search engine crawlers follow the links to all your individual webpages so that it won’t miss out on anything. Sometimes we leave out URLs or hide them from all visible pages because we don’t exactly want some of the users to go there. As a result, some of these URLs are uncrawlable to search engine spiders.

We can still leave those URLs hidden from some users without having to lose out on those pages not being crawled by search engine spiders through including them in an XML Sitemap.