Forum Is an XML sitemap that crucial for forums?
 

Hi there! I've been going on an SEO pilgrimage through every page of my site and having got my entire website nice and optimized I now turn my attention to my site's vB forum/CMS. I've added an XML sitemap of my main site to Google and Bing but I'm curious if it's all that crucial to make an XML for my forums as well. It seems that everything is so well linked to everything in a forum and CMS environment that the crawlers would have no problems finding their way around the entire community. If I do an XML sitemap for my community, should I have it automatically update semi-regularly? What are some best practices and/or what are some of the more experienced users doing (particularly interested in some perspectives from any SEO experts out there).

That said, I'm not keen on using any third party SEO solutions for my forums so, with that in mind, is there anything that you guys would recommend for making sure that my forum's SEO is working well? Any code I need to tweak, or settings I need to alter? From the looks of things it seems that vanilla vB 4.2 seems to be handling SEO relatively fine, but I figured I'd double check and ask everyone here if there's any tweaks that they would advise. Thanks so much everyone!