One piece of the SEO puzzle entails information architecture. In addition to getting indexed, think of search engines as people for a moment. They come to your site and they try to figure out what you are about. The more organized your content, the better. Site maps are a part of helping the engines understand us.
Thanks. "information architecture" is known to the search engine experts as latent semantic indexing.
quick question: would this apply even if your site was very small? I have one site with 70 something pages (and have a site map on that one....), but other small sites just at 5-7 pages or less. Since there are so few pages, is a site map still recommended or necessary? thanks!
HTML sitemap for the web crawl and XML via GWT and you should improve your indexing - though their are more important factors this is a good start.
I think., indexing is the main purpose of creating/submitting sitemaps to search engine, otherwise some pages may be left uninexed, also it makes indexing faster than indexing without submission...
sitemap is like a map of your pages, it helps the search engines to crawl you inner pages and also useful to get indexing in search engine
Yes it is a way to make it easy on the search engines to index your pages. Certain criteria are not relevant once the search engines are familiar (crawl frequently). For instance I have a site with 50,000 pages and Google does not care for me to tell it the pages are updated daily... it already knows it!
It helps in indexing and that's a part of SEO. It also tells search engines how well your site is organized and how often your site is being updated. You cal also specify priorities of pages to crawl, and all of these are parts of SEO.