Is the google site map really effective?

This is a simple HTML sitemap: http://www.katinkahesselink.net/sitemap.htm Great for my visitors.

I use 'Google-sitemaps', the online google-service for statistics, but I haven't created any special sitemap for them. Those are really meant for websites that are hard to index for google, for instance sites with dynamically generated pages. That's the way I understand it anyhow. Since most pages on my website are indexed anyhow, why bother with more?

Google-sitemaps (the online tool) is great for finding out which key-words people are using to get to your domain - through the different google-engines.

They also report errors they find: I've been having some weird pages 'not found' though - pages that don't exist. Obviously that makes sense: if they don't exist, they can't be found. But what I can't figure out is, why is google looking for them in the first place?

 

paul - what he means is you build a page on your site, and in that page you point/link to all of the pages you want to index using keyphrases.