A site map is a comprehensive list of pages within a website's domain. It can serve three primary purposes: offering structured listings specifically designed for web crawlers such as search engines,[2] aiding designers during the website planning phase, and providing human-visible, typically hierarchical listings of site pages.
Site maps can be displayed in a number of different map styles. Some styles display thumbnails for each page, others use text-only presentation.
Map styles include:
- Electrum – a simple thumbnail map style
- Electrum 2.0 – a variation of the Electrum style that works better on larger sites
- Isometric – a thumbnail map style using a pseudo-3D isometric projection
- Page Cloud – a thumbnail map style with pages clustered into 3D clouds
- Skyscrapers – an abstract representation of pages that looks like city blocks
- Thumb Tree – a hierarchical thumbnail map style
- Table Map – a plain text list of pages in a table
- Table of Contents – a plain text list of pages
- Tree View – an expanding table of contents
Site maps can also be exported in XML site maps format for use by the Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines.