If you are designing a website yourself, or are even having one designed by professionals, then the importance of a Site map cannot be stressed enough.

What is a Site Map? A site map on a website is a list of all the web pages, or at least the most important ones, listed in a hyper-linkable form on a separate page of its own.

Why Have a Site map? Having a site map on your website is absolutely vital for two important reasons.

The first reason, is that even if you think that your web site is well designed, and that all the pages are easy to locate and get to, this might not necessarily be the case. Everyone uses the internet differently and some customers may have trouble in locating a page. Therefore, a site map which lists all the pages is vital for them.

The second reason, is that search engines discover and catalogue web sites by exploring the links on the site. Sometimes, this happens only up to a page depth of three. Therefore, having a sitemap which is linked from the home page, means that the search engines will be able to 'spider' your entire website from just one page. This is extremely important, as the more pages which are indexed by the search engines, the higher the chances are that your pages will be listed when people type in certain search terms.