#9 is not great advice. Sitemaps will not affect your ranking for any term ever. If you are looking at Sitemaps as a tool for better ranking, then you are doing

#9 is not great advice. Sitemaps will not affect your ranking for any term ever. If you are looking at Sitemaps as a tool for better ranking, then you are doing it wrong. Sitemaps help is discovery. If some of your pages are not crawled or just poorly crawled sitemaps can help in that regard. If those pages have good content then you may rank well. The ranking benefit of Sitemap is just a side effect.