Sitemaps have quite a few benefits. They make navigation around a website easier and give a website more visibility on search engines. Sitemaps inform search engines immediately of any changes or updates to your website, which increases SEO elements. Search engines won’t index changed (or new) pages immediately, but they will be indexed faster than without a sitemap.

If your website is brand new, or if you have created quite a few new pages, or updated the majority of the pages on your site, then having a sitemap can be vital. For now, you can go without a sitemap. But, moving forward, it looks as though sitemaps will become the means by which to submit websites to search engines. While spiders will continue indexing websites (sitemaps will never make the standard website crawling procedures obsolete), the importance of sitemaps will keep increasing.

If you have a sitemap, you won’t need to rely so much on external links to other websites to increase you search engine rankings. Sitemaps can also be of assistance if you have messy internal links (like broken links and orphaned pages) but, keep in mind that it is always better to fix these links.

Sitemaps classify your website’s content. Although, keep in mind that search engines are not obliged to classify a webpage in a specific category, just because your sitemap tells it to.