I'm more of a back end developer and can't answer this question from my own research. When setting up the links in my sitemap, do I need to include the pages that I link to in my top navigation and footer? These links show up on all pages and will be crawled if/when any page on the site is crawled.
2 Answers
Links that will ordinarily be crawled when your site is crawled, like those in a top navigation or footer, don't necessarily need to be included in a sitemap. As specified by Google:
Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover...Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.
Just make sure they won't be blocked through some other means (like Disallowed in a robots.txt, hidden in complex JavaScript, blocked with a noindex meta tag on the page, or an X-Robots-Tag HTTP header, etc...).
If you are referring as sitemap to links that you put in your website to help the users to find your content easily, you can add those links as plain text if that helps to better recognize the structure of the site. If you are referring to those sitemaps that you send to Google, I personally don't care, because I make them with an automatic crawler: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/