Noob Question on Googly Sitemaps

I'm building mine from scratch using the following code as a basis that i found at social patterns:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.socialpatterns.com</loc>
<lastmod>2005-06-03T04:20:36Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>always</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
<url>
<loc>http://www.socialpatterns.com/new-post/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-06-02T20:20:36Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

Are there any additional tags I need to add to this for google?

The BIGGEST question I have though is when I am sitemapping...I have all my pictures set up as http://www.AmericanShippingCenters.com/fulfillment.jpg on my website. I also have a menu.ccs file and a few other file types...do i need to index them in the same fashion...it looks as if this is what the auto mapping tools are doing, and I'm not sure its necessary? Do I have to go back and remove the full website name from the .jpg file location to get rid of those links?

Thanks...

The Noob

 

Also...I'm not sure if it matters or not, but when I run the google spider simulator...it always reads my menu first on every page. I know google bot hates duplicate content which is probably why my site has yet to appear on their search engine...is there a way to get it to skip this menu on every other page, but perhaps the index?

Thanks, I'm so glad I found this place, from what I've read, youz guyz have a wealth of knowledge!

 

You do not need to include .css files. Nor images for that matter.
Regarding menus. Well, I suppose you could use CSS to make it come last in your HTML. However, as long as you have page content, I would, in general, not worry much about this.

 

Why you don't use some standard sitemap generator to make a sitemap file for your websites? Under that case, you don't need to make any modification for the file.

 

I've used the one at audit my pc, and it doesn't map a single .html page from my home page for some reason So I just figured I'd list them and do it myself so I could rank them according to popularity, because I don't think it does that either...

 

I am using Wordpress and luckily i have got a plugin which automatically sitemaps my pages. However, after the recent drop in index and when i read this forum, i decided to delete it to see if deleting the sitemap does increase back my indexing..

 

What is your website url?

 

http://www.AmericanShippingCenters.com

I used a new sitemap generator...it seems to have worked...thanks to all for the help

 

i removed my sitemaps and my sites got indexed easier.. hmmpphh