For better or worse, much of any site's traffic is dependent on how search engines like Google index its content. Google regularly announces new services, many designed to help Webmasters manage the plethora of data about visitors to their sites, or to help Webmasters capture more Web traffic. One such service—Google Sitemaps—supports the latter goal by endeavoring to improve how Google's Web crawlers discover new content on your site to make it more quickly available in Google searches. This download goes over the nuts and bolts of the current rendition of Google Sitemaps and provides you with an example showing you how to get Sitemaps up and running for your organization. [TechRepublic : Determine your own destiny by using Google Sitemaps to drive traffic to your site]
Although I would love to see Google release something other than their Python tool to generate sitemaps, but even without creating a full sitemap, the Google Sitemap service is still very useful for tracking keywords that bring users to your site, broken links, your robots.txt file, and other traffic analyzation tools (though I am still waiting on an invite to Google Analytics).