A sitemap is essentially a table of contents for your website. But unlike the list of pages you might offer visitors looking for a quick way to navigate your site, the sitemaps we're talking about here are not designed for human viewing. Instead, a sitemap file serves the same information in a format that search engine spiders -- the automated machines that "crawl" the web and catalog its contents -- can easily understand. Sitemaps will go a long way to improving the searchability of any website. No self-respecting site owner should be without one.
A sitemap is a simple XML file named, fittingly, sitemap.xml. It gives the location, last-modified date and some other metadata for every page in your site.
When a search engine bot comes to your site and finds a sitemap, it will follow all the specified URLs, indexing the content and including whatever metadata and other goodies your sitemap instructs it to pay attention to.
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