Many webmasters use sitemaps as a way of ensuring that the most important categories and pages of their websites get included within the Google search engines index and can be found by the Google's freshbots / deepbots (now combined into freshdeepbot). Generally, this sitemap is a page linked to directly from the index page of the website (if not from all pages of the site) so that the main pages can be found within 2 clicks from the homepage. This sitemap will have html links (sometimes accompanied by text descriptions other times it is just a catalog of links).Many webmasters use sitemaps as a way of ensuring that the most important categories and pages of their websites get included within the Google search engines index and can be found by the freshbots / deepbots (now combined into freshdeepbot) of Google. Generally this sitemap is a page linked to directly from the index page of the website (if not from all pages of the site) so that the main pages can be found within 2 clicks from the homepage. This sitemap will have html links (sometimes accompanied by text descriptions other times it is just a catalog of links).
Google openly states that webmasters should keep the links per page down to less than 100 links "Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100)." Therefore, these sitemaps will have no more than 100 links, thus a sitemap is only good for sites with 100 pages or less until you must create a second sitemap. I'm sure all would agree and index page with "sitemap1, sitemap2....sitemap50" is ridiculous. Generally, I try to keep my navigation models and link architecture rather flat and accessible, eliminating the need for such sitemaps.
Search Optimization 
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