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Sitemaps serve a couple of different functions and are a great component to have on your web site.

There are two different types of sitemaps - visible and invisible.

A visible sitemap is intended to help your web visitors. This kind of site map is a single web page that contains an organized listing to the different pages on your web site. The purpose is to make it easier for your visitors to find exactly what they need quickly.

Since visible sitemaps are web pages, somebody needs to actually create a web page containing the links and then upload it to the server. Microsoft has a good example of a visible sitemap on their site.

Invisible sitemaps are intended to help the search engines crawl and index your web site. These are not visible to your visitors.

These kind of sitemaps are usually a one-page XML document which contain a listing of all your web page URLs. This file is uploaded to your web server’s root folder.

They can be created by manually by hand or you can use an online sitemap generator to do it for you.

Even if you use an online sitemap generator, it’s a good idea to go back and manually edit the file as you add more pages to your web site and make changes (be sure to upload the updated file to your server).

Having this information in one file makes it a lot easier for search engines to crawl your site and to know which pages belong on your site (especially if you have broken links). So it’s a good idea to create one.

You can search Google for “Sitemap generator” to find a bunch of different ones available. One of the easiest ones to use is XML-Sitemaps.com (which is free to use if you have less than 500 pages).