A sitemap is a file that you put in the root of your website. It's hidden and only for googles' spiders to grab and read. What is it is, simply said, a list of all urls inside your website. Once you have this google will soon be listing not only the main index of your site, but possibly every single page of your site for people to find. It's a rumor that sitemaps are becoming not that important in SEO. Years ago this was the power of your site being listed, but now that there is so much more to SEO this is quickly becoming lower on the list for an important task. However, I don't trust the rumors and we got sites to get big so we should do EVERYTHING in our power to make the site do well with search engine traffic.

How to get a sitemap going?

If you search on google for sitemap generator or something like that there's many websites that you can create one right online. Do not pay money for one, some sites are jerks and will try to take advantage of you. Sometimes you can use a program to go through your website for this list, and sometimes it'll do it right at the site. This may take a longtime(hours) if your site is huge. Once it's done you'll get to download a file with the extension of .XML. You are then supposed to take that file and upload it to your main directory in your site. After this you go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ , sign up if your not, then do as they instruct. They will ask you to verify that it's your website so just do what they ask. When your ready you'll be able to upload this sitemap to your google webmaster account.

Once you have the sitemap in google and your done with all of that google will be able to read better into your site. Do yourself an obvious favor and put google webmaster tools in your favorites because you will have to go back to it for other reasons in the future. It gives pretty decent stats on your keyword ranks. Another important factor is if you start adding new pages you'll have to re-create a new sitemap and send it to google webmasters so that it's up to date.

You can download a great program called gsitemap that will create sitemaps, rors, urllists, and robots that I can offer forward you to. It does the trick well.

http://www.vigos.com/products/gsitemap.