With millions of sites in existance, How do you get yours noticed? The best way it to have your site high up in the rankings of useful and relevant sites. Google is the most widely used and well known search engine online today. There are a number of ways you can get your site noticed and it wont happen with out a little effort on your part. People just dont come by themselves.
Google has a system to determine how important websites are. Their automated spiders crawl the net everyday gathering and indexing all the information they collect. That information is used to calculate page ranking. The page rank is determined by how many sites link to your site. The more links the higher your page is ranked. The links that have relevance to your site have heavier weight that just any old links. Recently people who have been using paid links and selling text ad links have been penalized by google and their page ranks dropped dramatically.
This is where sitemaps come into play. Simply put a sitemap is a guide to everthing that can be found in your site. It contains all the links to everything contained in your site. The navigation your users need to move from page to page. Does the sitemap help you to have it better ranking in google? It can because google counts internal links as well as external links. the more pages you have in your site the more internal links you have, the higher your page rank will be.