I'm a newbie to the Sitemap concept, so could anyone inspire me as to how this will improve my seo and what's the best way to generate one?

It's not going to improve your SEO but it will help se crawling deeper pages.
You have to create a xml sitemap and submit it to Google Webmaster Tool ONLY if you have pages that do not get crawled naturally. It is always better if SEs can find your pages on their own. If everything is working well, don't change anything.

If you're using a Wordpress website, you can use the plugin. XML helps find deeper pages so they can get ranked as well. It's pretty good if you have some great content that no one seems to go to.

No I'm not using Wordpress. Any suggestions?

sitemap helps SEs to easily crawl and index a site... but also for your visitors, its like a table of contents of your site..

Search some sitemap generator, here's few:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

http://www.auditmypc.com/free-sitemap-generator.asp

Using XML sitemap the search engines can easily crawl and index the pages in your site. Website sitemap helps users for easy navigation.

Use sitemap generator then upload it to your root directory.

Sitemap could contain all the information about your web,and if you submit the sitemap of your web to some popular search engine ,it could make the spider crawl your web faster .You can use rapidsitemap.com to make a sitemap.

For the different Search Engines, sitemap will be different. For google there is a XML sitemap and for yahoo there is a urllist.txt which is a txt file. Sitemap is basically helps search engines to crawl all the pages of the Website.

Thanks
Allvira

Sitemap are the list of pages that are in a site and when you submit them to the search engines like google and yahoo they know what you have and and if any search result match any of your pages.You are shown in their results

I've been submitting my blog's sitemap in google webmaster tool...

The definition of Sitemap are all above. Try also to read some related articles pertaining to sitemap.

Thanks!

Once you have your sitemap created, don't forget that Google isn't the only search engine to submit the sitemap to. You can submit your sitemap to yahoo, google, ask, and msn. YOu can also submit it directly and monitor it via the google webmaster tools.

Once you have your sitemap created, don't forget that Google isn't the only search engine to submit the sitemap to. You can submit your sitemap to yahoo, google, ask, and msn. YOu can also submit it directly and monitor it via the google webmaster tools.

I believe that there are no need to submit sitemaps. They will be found by the bots while the next time the will be on your web site. If you web site is indexed just do not worry about it

so.. can someone brief me a paragraph or two about sitemap. What is it and its purpose?

It is a XML file and it's purpose is to allow bots to access pages that are difficult to for crawlers reach, ie behind forms, too many querystring parameter etc.

While sitemaps wont directly help you improve your rankings, the sitemap can help you get indexed quickly and if you monitor your site from the Sitemap interface you'll be able to see what search terms are bringing traffic to your website and where you are ranking for them as well.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

It is a XML file and it's purpose is to allow bots to access pages that are difficult to for crawlers reach, ie behind forms, too many querystring parameter etc.

I'm doing some site analysis and it includes sitemap. This information really helps. Thanks.