There are sitemaps and there are sitemaps, then there is the Google Sitemap.
A sitemap is a good thing to have on your site. Some people will use it to find a page they had once visited and can't seem to find again. Others will use it because it is a good place for navigation. Anyway that your users find to use your sitemap is a good thing.
The real benefit in a sitemap however, lies in the fact that all the links to your site are in one place where the spiders can definitely find them all. Be sure to use the follow tags on this page.
I advise you to keep the links on any given page of your site under 100. Google states in their TOS (Terms of Service) that they don't want more than 100 links on any given page. I try to keep it under 75 links myself.
I also like to setup the sitemap much the same was a search engine provides it's results. Matter of fact, just like that. This way the human users who pass by have a good description of the page and it's URL with a link. Bingo! Plus the search engines get a link to each page with a good keyword in the description. It also uses the title tag as the links anchor text. Be sure to create excellent title tags.
You can create a sitemap here in this course with the tool I have setup for the purpose.
http://www.seomen.com
I will have this setup very soon, right now please be patient with me.
The Google Sitemap
The Google sitemap is intended to help you have Google find all the pages on your site. Here is what Google actually says about their sitemap; "Google webmaster tools are an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google." You can get to the Google sitemap page here:
https://www.google.com/
You can create one here in this course with the tool I have setup for the purpose.
http://www.seomen.com/cgi-bin/goomap/search.cgi?Mode=Admin
I will have this setup very soon, right now please be patient with me.
Once you have your sitemap ready you need to go to Google and let them know you have set it up and want to submit it. They provide two methods to verify that you own the site. One is to put an empty file onto your server, in the root directory named to a specific name that they will provide to you. The other option is to place a special meta tag into the <head> area of your main home page.
Once you are verified you can submit your sitemap to Google, they will spider all the pages provided in the sitemap. Please note that dynamic URLs will probably generate errors. Like I have said a million times, stay away from dynamic sites and stick with plain ole' static HTML.
