Your website is a set of interlinked pages consisting of anything from a few pages if its a small website up to tens of thousands of pages for big websites.
Robots from search engines have historically come to the home page of your website and then over a period of weeks or months gone to all the link off that page, then visited all the links off those pages etc - a process that can take sometimes months to find all the pages and index the content - and often end up poorly linked or new pages.
Sitemaps are something that have been around for a few years but are gaining momentum. There is a sitemap standard (http://www.sitemaps.org/) which the bigger search engines such as Google, Microsoft/Bing and Yahoo have adopted.
The Sitemaps standard is essentially an XML file (a special format) which details all the pages on your website. Robots will check for the existance of a sitemap file and if it exists it will visit every URL within the file and index it.
This consolidated list of all pages on your website means that robots no longer have to find their own way around your website looking for content, but instead they get given a complete list of all the pages.
New pages can be found and indexed very quickly (we've seen new pages appear in Google within minutes), and it is something that we feel should be part of any website that you have developed.
All Zarr websites have a sitemap which is automatically updated several times a day with details of all pages on the website.
If your website is struggling with getting ranked and you don't have a sitemap, ask your web developer why a sitemap doesn't exist - or contact us.
Put a sitemap in place and you will see the benefits!