Atelier Studios

A Sitemap.xml protocol is a file that informs the search engines about all of the URLs on the website that are available to be crawled by them. Although this may seem similar to a Robots.txt file, a sitemap allows for users to include extra information about each individual URL that a Robots file cannot supply. A site map file allows the user to include information about how often the site gets updated, how often it should be scanned and  what priority the particular page has in relation to the rest of the pages on the site.

This means that sites can be crawled more efficiently and intelligently by search engines. For example you can specify for certain pages to be crawled every day, which is useful for news pages and other regularly, updated content.

Sitemaps are also particularly useful for sites that have a great deal Flash as many smaller search engines still cannot crawl sites that are rich with this.