Search Engine Optimization - Build a Site Map

If your site has more then one page, you need to build a Site Map. With a little work and planning, your Site Map can become a very useful tool for many of your visitors.

There are two main reasons for building a Site Map:

Search Engine spiders index your entire site easier "search-engine friendly" as search engine crawlers use internal links to spider a site and do not crawl javascript links. Having a "Site Map" link at the index page ensures that the most important pages of your web site are definitely seen by those crawlers

You show the visitors an entire overview of the structure of your site, and indicate how much effort was put into usability testing during your site's construction. Site Maps can also be used for documentation purposes by printing the menu structure through your favorite browser/authoring tool

Did you know that 27 percent of the visitors use the Site Map to learn about your site structure?

That means if your Site Map is poorly designed, you may lose 27 percent of your visitors. That could translate into millions of dollars of missed sales for an e-commerce site, or a massive amount of missed leads for a service company.

Here are some ways to build a better, stronger, and more usable Site Map:

It is a site map, so that is what you call it: Do not name the link to your site map anything other than Site Map

Link prominently: It is useless to obscure the site map link, place it where it is easy to find

Put all link to the site on your Site Map. The best site maps have nothing to hide, so include all links, from your Privacy Policy to your Contact Us page. If it starts to get too long (more than a few page scrolls), consider alternate ways to conserve space like multiple columns or dynamic drop-down boxes. (But think about Search Engine Spiders if you do that)

Separate your content groups: Don't simply throw all of your links onto the page; make each content piece its own headline, with appropriate sub-sections displayed clearly below it. Use bulleted lists and avoid tiny font sizes that are unreadable

Make each link direct: It is frustrating to end up on a Web site page that you do not intend to see. If a visitor clicks on a link, they expect to get to that specific page, not the section overview page

Do not get too fancy: Some think it is neat to have complicated Flash animated site maps. Site Maps are not meant to be cool, they are supposed to be purely functional, so leave the Flash behind

SEO / SES

Link Exchange

Common Tasks

By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable the Google crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct the Google crawlers, they hope to expand their coverage of the web and improve the time of inclusion in their index. Google Sitemaps are an easy way for you to help improve your coverage in the Google index. It's a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep them informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages. It's very important to have a site map so search engines can find all of your pages. Also many of your visitors use site maps to navigate your Website to get where they need to go instead of looking for links. Just point CoffeeCup Google SiteMapper to where your Website is located at on your hard drive and it will create a nice page you can use for a site map. All of your Web pages will be listed and linked in order and the page will match your existing colors, backgrounds, etc....