Sitemap:

The Sitemap is a special page within a website which lists each individual page and document within the entire site (if not too extensive) including the internal linkingstructure. This is not the same as a site summary.

A well designed Sitemap is not only helpful for a site visitor but also has a high value for the webmaster because it contributes to a fast and full indexing of the whole site by search engine spiders which can follow the link s from the Sitemap to every single page.
 

Example of a Sitemap on www.hdtvplace.com

A Google Sitemap is still something else. While a normal Sitemap is in HTML format and designed to be read by a human visitor who loaded the page in his web browser, a Google sitemap is intended to be read by Google’s spiders only. It provides similar information but is in XML format (Extensible Markup Language) and wouldn’t make much sense to a human. It also includes a feature to automatically notify Google every time the content is updated or changed.

The purpose of a Google Sitemap is to deliver the full outline of the website in a machine readable format. The advantage for the webmaster is that he can get every page of his site listed in the Google Sitemap indexed as soon as his Sitemap is submitted.

[Site comes from Latin situs = position, arrangement;

map derives from Latin mappa = napkin (because maps were often drawn on napkins)]

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