Why is sitemap important!.. How does it work?

well it help SEs bots to easily crawl and index your site..

That is recommended by the SE. So I suppose that is the must for the any SEO things you are doing for your web site but that is not the guarantee you will have the site on the top.

there are two types of sitemaps. XML sitemap, html sitemap.
XML sitemap is meant for crawlers and html for users. Both are created for the convenience of crawlers and users respectively. To get the all links view on a single page these sitemaps are created.

Could some one provide me with a link where i can get more info on sitemaps and their importance in SEO?? Thanks. Am aware of this matter but not so very knowledged in this matter.

Sitemap is important for better inclusion of your website into search engines. Sitemap helps search engines to know about your website pages.

For getting in more detail about sitemap's importance u can make a search into Google and there are many discussions can be found there.

site map whether in xml or txt format helps search engines discover and index your new content faster. if you add a new page with fresh content and then create a new sitemap and submit it to major search engines such as google your new page can get indexed in less than one hour.

It's the map for search engines to crawl over your sites and index.

Originally Posted by james.henry

Why is sitemap important!.. How does it work?

Sitemap is important to help your site pages get index and even the deep pages within your site.

It must be an XML sitemap! You can submit an XML sitemap to Google and it will help google search every single page on your website. Each of these pages has a chance to be indexed, and no page is left unturned.

2 type of sitemaps. HTML sitmap for the visters to tell all of ur links. XML sitemap tell SE about ur links to index quickly. otherwise may SE bots ignore / forget some pages to index.

As said by Jollygreat there are two types of Sitemap one for Search Engine Crawler (XML Sitemap) and one for user navigating your site (Html Sitemap).

And you should use both on your site to help Bot as well as users.

Thsi will help your site to look smooth and also help bot to easily index your site quite easily.

Here are the free tools you can use for XML Sitemap generattion and it's free too
www.xml-sitemaps.com
www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

Originally Posted by james.henry

Why is sitemap important!.. How does it work?

It's like asking this question, Why table of contents is important for a book?

Of course, the answer would be the same, to identify what page is what and which page is which...

In short, you are helping bots to better understand your linking structure and would also mean easy and faster crawling.. Nobody wants to mislead bots, I guess, when it crawls their sites.