Vanessa Fox shares why sitemaps (or XML files that list all the pages on a site) are important for a search-friendly site.
Many government sites have poor information architecture. Ideally each page of the site should have at least one link to it. This helps users navigate the site and helps search engines find all of the pages. Long term, these sites should revamp their navigational structure so that at least one link exists to every page. Since that may take some time to implement, an XML Sitemap can function in the meantime to provide a list of all pages for search engines to crawl.
If possible, provide an HTML sitemap as well, which provides a browsable navigation to site visitors.