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An XML document (Extensible Markup Language) A sitemap is a text file that lists all of a website's URLs. It can include extra data (metadata) on each URL, such as when it was last updated, how essential it is, and whether there are any other versions of the URL available in other languages. All of this is done to make it easier for search engines to crawl your website, allowing any changes, such as when a new page is created or an old one is removed, to be immediately fed to them.
Although an XML Sitemap does not guarantee that search engines will crawl and index your sites, having one boosts your chances, especially if your navigation or general internal linking strategy does not link to all of your pages.
Is a sitemap absolutely required? No, not in a technical sense. Your website will still function without one, and search engines will be able to crawl and index it. Furthermore, sitemaps aren't employed as a ranking signal, thus submitting one won't help you climb the rankings.
So, why are you doing it? Indexing is the most important reason to develop and publish your XML sitemap. Adding a sitemap makes it much easier for search engines to locate your pages, even if they can still find them without one. You may have orphaned pages (pages that have been left out of internal linking) or pages that are difficult to locate. When you've recently added pages or developed a completely new site with few, if any, links to it, your sitemap is very vital.
Sitemaps also help in the intelligent crawling of your sites by search engines. They account for 'and' tags and alter their crawl frequency accordingly. You get to be a little more proactive when it comes to attracting search spiders to your pages. By increasing a page's priority, it's more likely that it'll be crawled and indexed more frequently and before less vital areas of your site.
You can use your XML sitemap to your advantage if you have a geo-targeted international site or a site with the same page translated into several languages. Using hreflang tags in your sitemap informs spiders that you have several versions of your page, as we shown in the example above. This information can be used by search engines to ensure that users are served the correct version based on language and/or region.
