The main benefit to using a sitemap is the navigation and the visibility by the humans and the search engines. You just need to generate the sitemap and submit it to search engines. This will make the indexing of the site faster by search engines.
Without a sitemap you need to rely more on the external links to the site that helps the search engine to find and index your site. So having a sitemap makes you independent to rely on external backlinks.
If you have a new site or your site is constantly updated with large number of new pages then sitemap is the best way to make the SEs aware about the updates to your site.
It easily helps to bifurcate and classify the data.
Now all the search engines are changing their sitemap algorithm for SEO of the site, so in near future sitemap is going to get lot of importance by the search engines.
Google Sitemap WordPress Plugin
The Google Sitemap WordPress plugin will automatically generate Google-compliant sitemaps for your blog. Additionally, the Google Sitemap WordPress plugin also generates sitemaps that Yahoo, Ask, and MSN can read.
The plugin also automatically calculates the priority of each blog entry, based on the number of comments posted therein. This prioritization system can be overridden, however, via a menu where the user can input the parameters he wants the sitemap to follow.
The Google Sitemap WordPress plugin generates XML files in many languages, which is perfect for the regional indexing that Google has introduced in recent years.
Also of notable importance is the fact that the Google Sitemap WordPress plugin pings search engines that can read the sitemap it generates every time a change therein is made. No need to manually resort to an external pinging tool. This plugin takes care of such a task.
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