Does Sitemap help your site SEO ranking?

Apart from the usual HTML page sitemap available for users as a navigation aid listing pages on the site, there is a Sitemap XML protocol which is a common standard agreed by main search engines Google, MSN and Yahoo in November 2006. In 2007 it was joined by Ask.com and improved into ‘autodiscovery’. The new open-format autodiscovery allows webmasters to specify the location of their Sitemaps within their robots.txt file, eliminating the need to submit sitemaps to each search engine separately.

Sitemap is an XML standard file which allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently by giving them information about site content and structure. Sitemaps are a URL inclusion protocol and complement ‘robot.txt’, a URL exclusion protocol.

Sitemap XML consists of mandatory tags like pages URLs and optional tags providing information like when the page was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site.
Sitemaps are particularly beneficial on websites where:
o there is large number of pages with dynamic URLs
o some areas of the website are not available through the browsable interface, or
o webmasters use rich AJAX of Flash content that is not normally processed by search engines.

In addition to regular Sitemaps, there are other protocols designed to give information about specialised URLs. For example Video Sitemaps is a Google extension of the Sitemap Protocol that helps make embedded videos more searchable via Google Video Search. By submitting this video-specific Sitemap in addition to the standard Sitemap, you can specify all the video files on the site, along with relevant metadata. Other extensions include: Mobile Sitemaps, News Sitemaps, Code Search Sitemaps.

The Sitemaps are free and available at sitemaps.org. Any webmaster or site owner can create and upload an XML Sitemap and submit the URL of the file to participating search engines.

Although submitting sitemap is the best way to let main search engines learn about your website, it doesn’t guarantee higher page rankings. Sitemaps only supplement and do not replace the existing crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. By submitting Sitemaps to a search engine, a webmaster is only helping that engine's spiders to do a better job of crawling their sites. Using this protocol does not guarantee that web pages will be included in search indexes, nor does it influence the way that pages are ranked in search results.