hi all,
how are sitemaps important for search engine optimization process? google gives credit to the website that have sitemaps. Is this the reason we use sitemaps ? anybody please suggest…
thanks in advance.
Sitemap is important to your site be correctly indexed and crawled
With the help of sitemap you can easily get indexed in Google because site map contains all links of our site so it is easy to index all pages in one time. Google also crawl all pages of your site if you added site map in Google.
Unfortunately this is not true 
Oh how I wish it was that simple.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156184&hl=en
Quote from the above link:
Google doesn’t guarantee that we’ll crawl or index all of your URLs. However, we use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site’s structure, which will allow us to improve our crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future. In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it.
Sitemaps are useful in many ways.But it is more useful to index your site well in search engines.
i think search engines like sitemaps because it makes it easier for them find pages. not sure if that would help get indexed faster though.
Agree with the all above posts. Site map helps the search engines. It instructs the search engines like no follow, inner pages & back links etc.,
Simply, Site map is a user friendly to search engine spiders & for easy site navigation
Google doesn’t gives credit to the website that have sitemaps.
The Google sitemap maka a website to get listed and updated by the search engine.
Sitemaps make navigating your site easier and having an updated sitemap on your site is good both for your users and for search engines. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines.
John_Betong hit the nail on the head. People seem to think that the inclusion of a Sitemap means that Google is going to visit every page on a website, whereas Google will only really use it to gather information on the sites structure, allowing it to know what NEEDS to be crawled.
As well as a Sitemap.xml file I have numerous “Google Alerts” set which are handy for checking if or when Google finds a change.
Here is a quote from their help pages:
Google Alerts are emails sent to you when Google finds new results – such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blogs – that match your search term. You can use Google Alerts to monitor anything on the Web. For example, people use Google Alerts to:
Ø find out what is being said about their company or product.
Ø monitor a developing news story.
Ø keep up to date on a competitor or industry.
Ø get the latest news on a celebrity or sports team.
Ø find out what’s being said about themselves.
Here’s how it works:
You enter a query that you’re interested in.
Google Alerts checks regularly to see if there are new results for your query.
If there are new results, Google Alerts sends them to you in an email.
For general queries like [ football ], you can get a summary of the new results every day.
For specific topics, like [ cardiovascular atherosclerosis ], you might not get an email every day, but you’ll find out when something new and relevant is published.
See more examples of how Google Alerts are used
A simple answer to that is this:
This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.
Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don’t have a sitemap.
Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site.