A hierarchical diagram of the pages on a website, starting with the home page at the top. A site map helps visitors navigate large, complicated sites by showing their entire structure. It is also used as a master diagram of the website for Web designers.
Search Engine Site Maps
A search engine site map, which is a file stored in the public folder of a website, helps search engines index the site better. For example, search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN support the Sitemap protocol, which is an XML-based description of the URLs for each page on the site. See
search engine optimization.