What is the benefit of having a sitemap? I'm sorry. I'm a complete newbie.

Well it helps to get your site indexed better in the search engines.

If you have many inner pages etc then submitting a sitemap will work nicely.

EX: Forums and Blogs and all can have benefits from submitting sitemap to the search engine.

Thanks.

The importance of site map.
with the help of site map a normal user easily visit your site and simply know where this page is exist and also search engine crawler.

Sitemaps help search engines know about any updates that you make on your site. It is not guaranteed that the search engine bot will immediately index the updated pages, but, the changes will surely be indexed much faster compared to when there isn’t any sitemap.

for visitors, a sitemap makes your website easier to browse, explore and navigate. for search engines, it is a better way to know the latest updates of your website, and it helps indexing the new updated pages faster. I just want to add that using .xml is far more better than .html sitemaps.

benefits are both for visitors, because it is an easy way to find out what interested in, without navigating through the entire site. but there are benefits for Google because it helps in indexing pages

with the help of site map your site is indexed fast search engine crawl all pages of your site with the help of site map.

A sitemap file helps the search bots find pages that have been ignored or may not normally get crawled.

The HTML sitemap is for your website  visitors.  It is designed to save you some work while it helps visitors find other sections of your website.

The sitemap.xml file is used by the bots from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search and Ask.com.

The site map is useful for you when the site visitors and the search engine crawlers access your website and site map in different ways. Site maps have a two-folded purpose. It gives easy access for the web crawlers. It also makes it easy for your visitors to access all the different pages on your website.
1. You can use a SiteMap as a planing tool for web design.
2. No page will be left unvisited.
3. Visitors will have an easier time to navigate your site.
4. A SiteMap may encourage more traffic.
5. There is potential advertising value when using a SiteMap.

If your site i having a sitemap, it becomes easy for crawler to visit and index all the pages in your site..!! A sitemap has a benefit for the search engines as well. sitemap will let the Google robot see how pages, such as those in the fourth and fifth level, fit into your site. If you link to your sitemap page from your homepage, all of the pages listed in your sitemap will be no farther from your home page than the third level. This will encourage Google to index your entire site.