Every website needs two sitemaps. One is an html sitemap that provides a page on your site where your site visitors can easily and quickly find the information they seek. The second Sitemap is in an XML format is easily read by search engines to learn more about your website, and this is the one we want to focus on at this time.
XML Sitemaps are currently followed by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Ask. Since Sitemap Protocol 0.9 has been standardized by sitemaps.org, the format can be read by all search engines. This is not so much a tool for search engine optimization as it is for search engine recognition. It is no longer necessary for webmasters to create multiple Sitemaps for search engines.
Two sitemaps serve different purposes but with the same end result in mind. You want your site visitors to be able to find your valuable content and promotions. Now let’s talk SEO: you definitely want the search engines to find your valuable, keyword-rich content.
Of course we would all like for our home pages to rank high in the search engines, but most of the time, it’s the inside pages we really want to rank high. Those are the pages that generate income for a content-rich site. You want your product or service comparison pages to rank well. You want your pages with Adsense or other PPC code to rank well. You want your pages with affiliate links to rank well.
XML Sitemaps help the search engines find and evaluate all pages on your website. Certainly you should submit your XML Sitemap to search engines. More importantly is that you can include a link to it in your robots.txt file directing search engines to it:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml
Of course you would replace mysite.com with your actual site name.
Google tells webmasters, "Sitemaps are particularly helpful if your site has dynamic content, has pages that aren't easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process - for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or Flash, is new and has few links to it or has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all."
Use your XML Sitemap to provide search engines with additional information about your pages, such as:
- how often you update your pages
- the last date you updated a particular page
- the relative importance of the pages on your site
The relative importance of your pages assigns a numerical value to a page's relationship to other pages on your site. For example, your home page would have a value of 1.0, the highest. A section page such as Home Business Articles would receive a relatively high value such as .8.
Individual article pages, in relation to Home Business Articles, are sub pages and, therefore, probably would rate a value of .5 or .6.
I recommend using a spreadsheet when planning your website. If you haven't already done that, then now would be a good time to create one. Your sheet will be similar to a flow chart by listing the section pages, the sub pages under those sections and any sub - sub pages under those. That makes it a lot easier for you to create your XML Sitemap and assign the necessary values.
And, of course, you can always use a sitemap generator to create it for you, but you really need to monitor it to make certain the information is correct, the values are correct, and that it looks exactly the way you want it.
Get Free Information about XML Sitemaps 
An XML Sitemap is a good strategy for you to use in getting your website noticed. You can do it for free, or you can purchase a sitemap generator program. Please understand that having an XML Sitemap and/or an HTML sitemap are not magic bullets. They are part of an overall strategy, the purpose of which is to get more traffic to your website.
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