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A sitemap is probably the last thing someone would make when making a website, if they make it at all. In the age of design, look and features often simple things like a sitemap is long forgotten. By mentioning the importance of a sitemap with respect to various points, I hope you could justify not just spending time on making a sitemap, but one that gives your website the backbone structure it deserves.
1) For the purpose of navigation.
How often have you used/seen the 'you are here' board in a map of a place you are not familiar with. Think of a sitemap as a similar board. If a website has hundreds of pages and links, its very easy for someone to wander off and get lost. Wouldn't it be great if he or she could just click the sitemap and see what information lies where. Obviously with search engine powered websites, its not clear to see the advantage. But imagine if you are in a mall with one of those 'you are here' boards, if you are searching for pizza hut, wouldn't you rather prefer someone who told you how to get there, rather than tell you where it is.2) Drawing your website's outline.
Lets face it, your visitor has far less patience than you and is definitely attention deficit. So how can you visitor come to know what your site is all about in less than 10 seconds before he moves on to the next result in the search page? Well, a sitemap would help. The sitemap would draw a general outline of what you have to offer in your website. If its good, you got your reader, if its not, he's out of here. 3) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engines function is unknown ways, but what’s known definitely is, when they come to your website they follow the links that they can see. Imagine how a sitemap looks to them, 'a link to all pages in this site, gee thanks'. All your pages get indexed. This would eliminate the need of travelling through the website to get all links and wondering why page162 is not indexed only realizing that there's no navigable link to that page. 4) Structured Organization
If you have taken a computer course in school, they would have taught you the importance of grouping related items into structures and classes. Think of your website 'sections' as the same thing. If you think of a new page to add to your site, where exactly would you put it? homepage? third page from the bottom? The site map can tell you the best place that its beneficial to you, your reader and search engines. So all said and done, make your sitemaps, if you use wordpress or commonly used content management systems, then use a search engine for a sitemap generator. If you are making your website from scratch, then manually make a sitemap and keep it updated.
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