I have a sitemap, but can tell you that I did not put one of my pages in the sitemap, but it's still indexed by Google.
Sitemap is just a suggestion to Google, it will crawl everything under the folder and it will decide what is relevant.
How does it help you? I don´t see any advantages using it. I do use it but i dunno what is the advantage.
Believe it or not, it does. I got a new site up yesterday and I submitted a sitemap to Google, and it's already in their index today.
yes. Sitemap is very much important for an website with SEO point of view. XML sitemap is what you need to include for benefits.
I think it might just help Google index your whole site faster. Google will find all your crawlable pages eventually, but for deep pages it doesn't have to wait for all the shallow pages to load in order to get to them. If you have a lot of deep pages Google won't crawl your whole site in one session (depending upon how big your site is).
Ya ....there is no doubt that sitemap is really need for SEO point of view because of XML sitemap in important to google becz google crawl your xml sitemap. And HTML sitemap is imp to user point to view bcoz can easily go your website any page.
are there any xml sitemaps that are general sitemaps? I mean to work with all -> Google, yahoo, msn, ask and others ...
First of all there are two types of sitemaps. One sitemap for users and one for Search engines. A sitemap for users may be beneficial in that it allows you to put every page on your web site just one click away for end users. Fewer clicks tend to help conversions, and on large web sites they may provide for an easy way for users to find exactly what they are looking for with the fewest clicks.