oh.. well submitting them to webmaster tools is useful for checking crawl errors or other issues but they have absolutely nothing to do with SEO. That they do is another common myth. Nigel
Yes site map is very important for website. basically it is helping at the time of crawling. Site map gives all the link to bot for crawling.
A well-designed Site Map(s) helps the search engines find and index your pages easier. The Site Map ensures that every page on your site is no more than two clicks away from the home page. The search engines are virtually guaranteed to find and index all of your pages by crawling the Site Map page.Having more pages indexed helps raise your site's Google PageRank and increases your website traffic. And as we all know, getting lots of traffic is the key to making money with your website. In conclusion, I recommend that every website have a well-designed Site Map. It's good for your users and good for the search engines (SEO benefits). Weblinkindia.net
Yes, submit sitemap in search engines helps to know about crawl errors and index your pages in search engines.
Sitemap is a funny thing... I have seen many 'small sites' with sitemaps, they have 5 pages, all are already indexed and are rarely updated. XML sitemap is useless and an HTML sitemap is also futile because all pages can be visited from any page on the site. Bigger sites have problems keeping their sitemap updated ;-)
Yes sitemaps are like roadmaps for the search engines. They are particularly important for large sites, or websites that are difficult for search engines to spider for one reason or another.
2 Reason why Sitemap matters 1.) for your website visitors/users who wants to explore or look deeper on your website, usually in html format (most important!) 2.) for search engine crawlers sort of guiding them what you want this crawlers to index, usually in xml format
It helps search engines crawl your site better so no page are missing. Plus, it is really easy to create. If you are using wordpress, just install Google XML SiteMap or search in google for SiteMap generator.
Sitemap will show you total pages crawled and any type of errors will be shown in Google Webmaster tool. Just submit your sitemap to Google webmaster tool.
Search Engines view your webpages without the graphics and scripts. Sitemaps makes it easier to view your webpage and make connect all of your pages.
You're assuming all pages are always listed on the sidebars or page selection area. That's not true with every website. I'm currently working on a website where only a fraction of the pages are viewable from any page. The rest have to be clicked from specific pages. And I know that explanation seems like it would be a pain for users, it's actually to make everything far easier on them.