HI,
From a search engine optimisation perspective there are a number of benefits for using a Sitemap:
* Your website gains easier navigation and better visibility from search engines.
* You get the opportunity to have your content changes indexed faster. Through the sitemap you basically inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site.
* A Sitemap gives you more freedom regarding your relation to external links, which usually have the role of bringing search engines to your site.
* It can be of help with accidentally broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other ways.
* It is of high importance for new sites to have a Sitemap: it speeds the process of indexing pages.
* It is of great help in classifying your site content better. Although it does not mean the search engines will necessarily classify a page as belonging to a particular category or as matching a particular keyword only because of your sitemap, there is an increased likelihood that they would.
Using a sitemap is of great importance for both humans and spiders (such as GoogleBot). As mentioned above, it makes it user friendly for humans and easier for spiders to ’see’ it.