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This feature from Google was released in 2005 and now included within the Google Webmasters facility as a means of indicating to webmasters what may be wrong with their sites and pages with the purpose of helping pages to be indexed. It's not an SEO tool, but enable us to strat the SEO process by indexing. In attempting to dissipate the 'ivory tower' image Google began to acquire, sitemaps was a means of finding out how Google views pages in your site(s). The suite of tools consist of three tabs: Diagnostic, Statistics, Sitemaps. Use Google sitemaps to address any problems (there are always some!) The suite of tools is exceptionally useful and should be employed by every SEO practitioner on behalf of their clients to fix issues and measure the health of the site as seen by the monster of search engines.
The Diagnostic tab has - Summary, an overview of errors found, URL's that are unreachable, URL:'s that are blocked by the robots.txt file, network errors, when the Googlebot last accessed your home page and how many sitemaps Google has that you have submitted.Crawl Errors, a description of the errors encountered if anyWeb Crawl, a list of URL's that the bot had trouble crawling - organising these into category types (not found, not followed, timed out, etc.)Mobile Web, a list of any problems the bot has discovered for mobile web renderingrobots.txt analysis, what your robots.txt file looks like and what any errors areSite Verification, a somewhat misplaced section that is the starting point - how to get all this information retrieved from the sitePreferred domain, another seemingly misplaced section - a little tool that tells Google that if they currently display http://mydomain.com as well as http://www.mydomain.com - would the webmaster like just one of those displayed as default? (This should also be stipulated in the htaccess file for when external sites link to one when the other is preferred - Note: one format should be chosen and maintained so that no search engine sees both pages and lists them as separate thus exposing you to duplicate content penalties).
The Statistics tab has -
Query Stats, an analysis of which search phrases returned your site and which phrases resulted in click through's to your site.Crawl Stats, which pages have which pagerank in Google - the distribution of pagerank across your site. It also shows which pages historically have the highest pagerankPage Analysis, covering Type - the content type of your crawled pages (Google uses content type for the File Format search option in Advanced Search), Encodings - the encoding used by your crawled pages, and Common Words - most importantly for SEO, words in your site's content, and in external anchors to your siteIndex Stats, advanced operators used in your site to reveal valuable things about the site - which pages are indexed (rather than which pages aren't, found in the Web Crawl utility), external pages that refer to your site's URL, backlinks (Google only shows 'some'), the current cache of your site, information held about your site (generally the information displayed when searches retrieve the site in SERP's), and external pages that are similar to the site (generally useless and misleading).
The Sitemaps tab has -
Submission of the sitemaps for the site. If the site is large, it may have multiple sitemaps and all can be submitted here. The format can be URL (html or xml), text or XML RSS feed
If Google chose to charge an amount monthly for the use of this tool, we would advise our clients to pay it without hesitation, and we'd pay and use it ourselves. As with much from Google, it's free and as such shouldn't be regarded cheaply - it's gold dust to a search engine optimisation campaign.
Further Reading: Google Sitemaps Explanation | Google Sitemaps Review


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