There are two types of sitemaps -- those primarily for your human visitors and those that are for your search engine robot visitors. (And I, for one, welcome our search engine robot overlords). Both types of sitemap provide a summary of content on the site in the form of links, and both can provide some SEO value if you build your internal links correctly. I'll focus primarily on the latter in this post, which are often referred to as XML Sitemaps and are supported by Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Ask.
XML Sitemaps allow you to "spoonfeed" the search engines the content of your site, including which items have been recently updated and which are a higher priority. This can be especially important if you use Flash or JavaScript, or if you have a large archive of content that isn't easy to navigate. (Although if that's the case, making it easier to navigate should be another project on your "to do" list).
If you are using Drupal or Joomla, you can find add-ons which will help you create the sitemaps automatically and then keep them updated after you've submitted them to the search engines, which is a great help. For Drupal, try the XML Sitemap module. Joomla's Extension Directory has a list of a bunch of different plugins of varying quality (XMap seems to be the most current and have the biggest user base).
If you have a small, basic site you can create your own XML sitemap by hand, or try an online XML sitemap generator.
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