Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

196

Tuesday: Shape Up Your Site Map

Last month, we suggested creating a site map to help search engine robots navigate

your site. If your website doesn’t have a site map, today you’ll consider creating one. If

you already have one, you’ll optimize it today.

Why Build a Site Map?

We think that just about every website can benefit from a site map, especially websites

that contain more than 10 pages. Most people know that site maps are good for the

user experience: they orient your site visitors and help lost visitors find their way to the

right page. But there’s even more benefit when you consider SEO. A site map can

improve the search engine visibility of your website in several ways:

• By providing search engine robots with links to navigate through your site

• By pointing search engine robots to dynamic or hard-to-reach pages that might

not be accessible otherwise

• By acting as a possible landing page, optimized for search traffic

• By providing ready-to-use content for the File Not Found page where visitors are

automatically taken if they try to go to a nonexistent URL within your domain

If your site is small enough that links to every page are included in your

global

navigation

(navigation provided on every page of your site) or absolutely every page on

your site is available within two clicks from the home page, then you may not need a

site map. But if your site is larger, and especially if it contains pages that may be hard

for search engine robots to find, we highly recommend a site map.

Site Map Design 101

Simply put, a site map is a page that links to every page on your website. If you’re like

many web surfers, you visit a site map as a last resort when you can’t find what you

need or if there’s no in-site search function. You’re happy to forget it as soon as you

leave it. But if a robot visits your site map, it’s not going to forget what it saw, and it

will be pleased as punch to come back on a regular basis. Here are a few pointers for

treating both robots and human users well:

Include the most important pages.

People will get lost if your site map contains too

many links. That means, if your site has more than, say, 100 pages, you’ll need to

Now:

Perform your spider emulator check for all of your landing pages. Make a note of any problems and

suggested solutions in your Task Journal.

c08. 8:08 196