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Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site. Information contained in the XML file includes when the URL was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site.

Other factors include how many sites link to you, if your content is unique and relevant, if Google can crawl the pages successfully, and everything outlined in Google's webmaster guidelines.

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

Sitemaps are particularly beneficial in situations when it is difficult for users to access all areas of a website through the browseable interface.

By submitting a sitemap file, you can take control of and help speed up the discovery of your pages, which is an important first step in the crawling and indexing process.

Sitemaps 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 Macromedia Flash or JavaScript menus that do not include HTML links. Google, MSN and Yahoo now jointly use the sitemaps protocol.

A sitemap provides an additional view into your site. By submitting a sitemap to a search engine, a webmaster is helping that engine's crawlers to do a better job of crawling their site.

Most search engines will only follow a finite number of links from a page, so if a site has a large "archive" or "database" of resources that aren't well linked to each other, the site map may be required so that search engines and visitors can access all content on the site.

Sitemaps may be particularly helpful if your site has dynamic pages that are only available through the use of forms and user entries, pages that aren't easily discovered by following links, or if your site is new and has few links to it. The sitemap files can then be used to indicate to a web crawler how such pages can be found.

Superb Hosting offers a Sitemap tool for all customers to generate a sitemap file containing all accessible URLs on their sites. This Sitemap file adhears to the Sitemaps Protocol and can be submited to the major search engines.