The preferred format of the site map

Generally speaking, a site map is a page or pages that contain a list and link to all the other documents on the web site. Site maps gained importance as a SEO factor; they direct the search of search engine spiders to all content pages. Spiders love site maps. With lots of pages and deep link structure spiders would need to work hard to find all your pages. When you give them one single page which maps to all content, you make their job easier and make sure that nothing gets missed.

The preferred format of the site map for Google spiders (and recently for Yahoo and MSN as well) is a list written in XML language. It is possible to use other formats but XML is the most effective one. Google states that XML site map is highly scalable so it can accommodate sites of any size.

Nevertheless, it is always a good idea to have a regular HTML sitemap on the site. Having a standard sitemap makes user’s experience better, especially, if your web site is big and have a lot of pages. You don’t have to put everything in the sitemap, because you don’t want to look it like a linkfarm. Try to keep the number of the links on the page under one hundred and use some kind of preface for each link, so the page will be more content-intensive. Overall, use some common sense and a nice SEO web design of the sitemap page.