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XML Sitemaps, (also known as Google Sitemaps) are accepted by all three major search engines as a source of information about your site. Google Webmaster Tools even has a spot where you can tell Google where to look for the sitemap, if you haven't already told search engines about it by using your robots.txt file or just thrown it into the root directory. There are even websites that will spider your site for free and generate a sitemap for up to 50,000 URLs. (Just look in Google under XML Sitemap Generator.)

Even though it is usually pretty easy to create and install, do you really need an XML sitemap? If your site is small enough, the answer might be "No." For instance, if you do a site: command on Google and see that all your pages are in the engine, then a sitemap isn't going to find any more of them. While it is possible to set a "priority" for pages using the sitemap, you may be artificially downgrading the importance of ranking pages by selecting this feature. In the past, people abused this feature by selecting a priority of "1" for all pages, so search engines may very well be skeptical of user prioritization. Webmaster Tools will actually give you a warning if it thinks your priorities are skewed.

If you've got a website with thousands of URLs, or your inventory changes on a regular basis, then an XML Sitemap may be the way to go. In this case, you want to have it built into your shopping cart to automatically update when you make changes. We always caution customers that a sitemap isn't going to improve rankings for pages that have already been cached, but it is an effective way of helping engines find new pages. Removing a deleted page from your sitemap also won't get search engines to take them out of their indexes, so a 301 redirect is still the preferred way to deal with page changes.

For the complete article go to: http://www.submitawebsite.com/blog/2009/10/do-you-really-need-xml-sitemap.html