How to determine if my site map needs work?

[GregWhiteStarMedia]

I recently spoke to a consultant at a search conference who took a look at my site map and mentioned it looked like google would have a hard time crawling the site and indexing new pages and changes.  I am managing an ecommerce site with a bunch of products, however, I am not an XML expert by any means so i'd appreciate any advice on what to look for in the site map that would possibly be affecting googles ability to crawl/index.

[danatanseo]

I think so. You can always run it through a sitemap validator like this one: http://www.validome.org/google/  I'm sure this will give you everything that you need to know. The 404's are pretty normal as long as you are monitoring them and making sure that they are 404's that you want, or if not you might create 301 redirects, etc.

Hope that helps!

[GregWhiteStarMedia]

thanks for the response..the sitemap is loaded in webmaster tools, and google says there are only a handful of errors (less than 25 and all look like 404 responses due to a page not existing).  Based on this, it sounds like all is okay right?

[danatanseo]

Have you loaded the sitemap into Google Webmaster Tools? That's a good starting point because Google will tell you where most of the problems are and give you suggestions on how to fix them. One of the most common things I have seen is having characters in the Product names or descriptions that XML doesn't like, i.e. HTML.