Good Sitemap Design

[SEOIC]

When designing a sitemap for a site, with an eye towards being more spider-friendly, what are the best practices to use? Specifically:
1. Organizing the links in a table (one link per cell) for sake of good looks - is that good or bad for SEs. Is it better to have a sitemap that's all text with no tables?
2. Is there a benefit to listing page name without a hyperlink, but following them with a descriptive link (with keywords)? For example:

Home - <keyword rich link explaining what's on that page>
Where "Home" is not a hyperlink, but the description in <> is a hyperlink.

Any thoughts?

Any other creative ideas for this page?

[Anthony Parsons]

#1 Providing your sitemap is staying away from deep tables, it makes no difference really. A deep table being:

<table>
<table>
<table>
<table>
<table>
<table>
<table>
<table>
<tr><td>Here's my sitemap content links...bad ju ju

#2 Using descriptive anchored text is far better than trying to stack crap in there. A sitemap has two main functions:

1. To allow search engines a map of your site to reference for indexing
2. For users to easily find what they want

If you begin stuffing long winded phrases that are kind off relevant, but not exactly, then your sitemap is defeating its purpose. If your site was about gift baskets, the you could simply make the home link either < Home or Gift Baskets Home >. I would just take the "home" personally.

The rest of the pages should be descriptive anchors, ie:

Baby Gift Baskets
Plush Toy Gift Baskets
etc etc.

This benefits both users and search engines, without annoying either with rubbish.