There has always been a debate in the SEO industry on the real importance of sitemaps. Some feel that sitemaps are non-essential to SEO as the search engine bots are smart enough to find their way through your pages and index them. I have personally always felt that if you can generate a sitemap for your website then why not? It definitely would not hurt to help the bots go through your pages quicker and faster. I have had some good success in getting pages from some of my new websites indexed faster in Google and Yahoo. Alan Bleiweiss of the Search Engine Journal also agrees that Sitemaps and Internal links of a website can go a large way in increasing organic search traffic and the number of pages indexed by search engines. Check out this interesting case study of the magic performed by sitemaps on a new website that he developed for a client (www.storageseeker.com).