Here's some quick tips on how to maximize the use of your sitemap.

1. Create a sitemap using your website's theme or template.

Sitemaps are built for humans and search engine spider. It should match your current website template to have a good overall look as well as serving the function of housing links to your other pages.

2. Link your sitemap from all of your pages

Create a text link on each of your pages that will lead to your sitemap.

3. Never put more than 100 links in your sitemap

The search engines might see this as spamming. If you have more than 100 pages, then divide them into categories. So you have 1 main sitemap containing just categories, and then each category have their own "mini-sitemap" containing links to each pages under that category.

4. Don't over-do the categorizing of your sitemap like creating further sub-categories under each category. The farther it is away from the main page, the less valuable it becomes from the eyes of the search engines.

5. It is best to have some one or two Liner descriptions for each of your link in your sitemap. Search engines wouldn't want to have a page just having links. I'm sure your visitors won't like that too. Have some small descriptions that would tell what that page is all about.