How are sitemaps important for the SEO process?
XML Sitemaps are important for SEO because they make it easier for Google to find your site's pages—this is important because Google ranks web PAGES not just websites. There is no downside of having an XML Sitemap and having one can improve your SEO, so we highly recommend them.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a marketing strategy that allows search engines to find and rank your site in their search results. Sitemaps are a way for your site to communicate with search engines such as Google, MSN or Yahoo.
The importance of a sitemap goes hand in hand with the importance of SEO. SEO is essential to generating website traffic and revenue. On the other hand, sitemaps are essential to getting those search engine "spiders" to search, index and rank the content of your site.
HTML sitemap is a plain text sitemap used by browsers to know and surf through your website pages. XML sitemap is a coded sitemap used to submit in webmaster tool to help spiders crawl them and index the webpages in search engines.