A sitemap, put simply, helps your website communicate better with search engines by telling them what pages are on your site.  They’re very useful if you have a large site or you update it often.  There’s really nothing too complex about them and they’re basically essential if you’re concerned with search engine ranking.

Our sitemap does a lot more than just list pages, though, and it’s even more beneficial if you’re doing SEO (search engine optimization) work.  In addition to communicating with search engines and building a list of pages in your site, ours generates two important reports: a broken link report and an SEO report.

The broken link report simply informs you of any bad links on your site, whether they’re linking to internal pages or other websites.  Some SEO experts believe this is a factor that can hurt your website’s standing with search engines, not to mention that it can lead to a poor user experience.  Let’s face it- if someone clicks a link on your website and the page can’t be found, it reflects poorly on the professionalism of your website.

The SEO report, really, is pretty amazing.  It gives a breakdown of 16 different SEO factors for every page of your site.  Click the details link next to any of the summaries and you’ll get a list of every page on your site that needs attention.  I thought about including a screenshot of the SEO report, but I don’t want to give any secrets away.

At any rate, there are lots of sitemaps out there that simply list pages for search engines, but I haven’t heard of any others that do what ours does.  If you’re really into making sure your site is fully optimized, give ours a try.