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 Site maps are often ignored by webmasters, as well as its value for both visitor-targeted and spider-targeted optimization is underestimated.
What is a site map? In most general terms, it's a page or pages that contain a list of and link to all the other documents on your site. Theoretically, it's designed to give your visitors a quick way to find what they are looking for on your site without browsing the entire content. Site map also aims at eliminating the need to link to every page of your site from your home page.
In the last few years, site maps have gained the importance as SEO-factors: they can be utilized to direct the search engine spiders to all of your content-rich pages. This is especially true for big sites, where a number of clicks are otherwise needed to get to specific pages through the numerous sections and subsections. If a site has thousands of pages, its webmaster should really consider dividing it into sections to make navigation easy. This also can mean that a search engine crawler needs to do a lot of work to find all of the pages. With a site map, spiders feel much more "relaxed". Mainly, a sitemap is important because of the following reasons: - It helps ensure that all of your content-rich pages are exposed to the search engine spider. With lots of pages and a deep link structure, the crawlers would need to work hard to find all of your pages. When you give them one single page which maps to all the necessary content, you make its job easier and ensure nothing gets missed.
- It gives you a way to spread Google's Page Rank (covered in one of the future lessons) to the pages that need it and distribute it among these pages. Page Rank is a very important part of Google's algorithm but sending it to the right pages may become a headache. So, instead of filling up your home page with internal links, you can use the site map to do the job.
- Site map can be used for a more advanced Page Rank distribution. Say your site has an "About Us" page which is solely designed for your visitors and not targeted at the spiders. If you link to it from every page on your site, such behavior will affect the rankings of your important pages. So, you can link to it from your sitemap and only have your important pages linking to each other.
Creating a site map gives you double advantage by offering your visitors more convenience and a better browsing experience, and smartly disposing of the search engines' power. Be sure to include a site map as a part of your overall SE Marketing strategy. Here we list our collection of tips to build an effective site map. A search engine-friendly and visitor-friendly site map Your site map must only be linked to from your homepage and no other page, because: a) you want the search engine spiders to find this link directly from your homepage and follow it from there and b) according to the Page Rank distribution concerns, linking to your sitemap from your home page only will spread the Page Rank quickly to pages all over your site.
If you have a large website of 50 pages or more, limit the number of pages listed on your sitemap to a maximum of 30, otherwise it can be taken for a link farm by the search engines. Limiting the number of entries to 30 makes map much easier for real human visitors to read. This step may mean splitting your sitemap over several pages – don't be afraid to do that, just make sure each of your sitemap pages links to the next. Otherwise both visitors and search engine spiders will find a broken link, lose interest and go away.
The title of each sitemap link should be keyword rich and link directly back to the original page. Always link from your sitemap to your pages using the anchor text that will help those pages with their rankings (i.e. use the keywords for link text that the page you're linking to is optimized for). Include around 10 – 20 words of textual content from the original page underneath each site map link. This creates more content for search engine spiders and human visitors can see exactly what each page is about before clicking. Besides, descriptions help bring the keyword density of the map down to an acceptable level, should this level be exceeded. Ensure that the look and feel of your sitemap page is consistent with the rest of your site. Use the same basic HTML template you used for every other page of your site.
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