To my disbelief, there are still a lot of netizens who are unaware of the true essence of a Sitemap. To settle the fact, a sitemap isn't a worthless feature. Indeed, there's no such thing as something for nothing. Same the sitemaps.

Basically, a sitemap is a special file that lists all the pages of your web site. It includes all the alterations as well as the additions. There are 2 instances when sitemaps are necessary:

1. When visitors can't access the entire web site through a browseable interface.
2. When the web site uses Flash or AJAX and search engines find it hard to navigate.

But if your web site is accurately-designed and comes with clean links, you can forego sitemaps. Why? Because your web pages could be trailed by web search engines just by following the links.

You can generate a sitemap containing all accessible urls on the site and submit it to major search engines such as Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask. These search engines utilize similar protocol now so it's easier to update pages information.