If there was any way for a website to have a bird's eye-view, a sitemap would be the way to go about it. Sitemaps are graphical illustrations that represent the architecture of a web site.

It could either be a document of any form which can be used as a planning tool for web design or it could also be a web page that will be able to list the pages on a particular web site which is systematize in a hierarchical fashion. Sitemaps are able to help visitors and search engine bots find different pages that are part of the site.

While there are some site developers that argue that site index is even a much more appropriate term for this particular function, different web visitors are accustomed to see each term and they commonly associate both to be one and the same.

However, since a site index is often used to mean a chronological order from A-Z, it can be seen as being different from the site map as the latter provides a general overview from top to bottom of the overall site contents.

Another thing that sitemaps do is that they can significantly improve the ranking and the search optimization of a site by ensuring that all of the pages can be found. This is most applicable if a site is using Flash technology or JavaScript menus that do not have any HTML links in them.

There are times that search engines will only follow a specific number of links from a page, so consequently, if there is a site that is very large, the site map could be required of it so that visitors could browse the contents of the site.

With regard to search engine optimization, the sitemaps essentially help sites get indexed. Whenever a search engine is queried with a particular site such as Yahoo! or Google, they send out "crawlers" that scour the Internet for pages that produce the algorithmic search results.

A sitemap enables a site to be visible when the search results are then displayed. If you are an owner of a site that depends on it for revenue, then including a sitemap and optimizing it would be very good things to consider.

So a sitemap is not just for organization but also for optimization-both for the results and the scope of one's website. If your website wants more exposure, then including a sitemap is one of the things that you can do to significantly raise it several bars.