Optimizing Sitemaps for Search Engine Optimization

Sitemaps are well-known to most of the people as many websites put their sitemaps on their homepage. But, that who doesn’t know, a sitemap is a web page which contains a list of all the links or pages of a website under different categories and headings, same as an index of a book. Sitemap can be a great tool for making search engines crawl through your web site in a much more effective manner, in that ways helping you get more web pages indexed, and ultimately getting you more visitors. Particularly, when a search engine visits the site map page it gets to see all the links within that website and this enables it to crawl through those pages.

Sitemaps also help visitors to get a summary of the whole web site, and hence it is also a great navigational tool. It helps visitors find specific pages through a single page, for which they might have had to follow several links to reach the desired page. Below are some examples of well designed site maps.

http://www.google.com/sitemap.html
http://www.lycos.com/sitemap.asp

This leads us to the next question, i.e. how should site maps be designed. Designing a sitemap can be as simple as designing any other static pages without any pictures, graphics, etc. But all effort should be made to keep the structure logical and simple. It’s best to browse through the web, and check out a variety of sitemaps before you decide on what kind of structure you want to follow.

Important things you should keep in mind, before creating a site map.

Homepage Link: It is important to give a prominent link from the homepage to the sitemap page, so that visitors and search bots can easily hit the site map page. In fact, preferably there should be a link to the site map page from every page of your website.

Text Links: Plain text links should be used for all the links, as some search bots can have problems crawling through JavaScript.

Categories: It is important to organize the contents into well defined categories, and even sub-categories for easy navigation of the user. Although this doesn’t have direct SEO implications, it makes more sense to the user.

Descriptive Content: It is ideal to add some content describing the links, as search engines tend to ignore pages, full of links. It is also important to use your targeted keywords in your descriptive content as well as in your anchor text.

Anchor Text Link: It is important to use page titles as your anchor text, so that you can increase your anchor text back links. This is helpful for search engine optimization as it increases your link popularity.

However, websites with less than 20 pages or sites where most or all the pages have links directly from the home page generally don’t need a sitemap. Consider the above things before designing a sitemap; add a little effort and you’ll have a well-designed sitemap for the search engine spiders that will keep them happy and satisfied and that will help you get good ranking.

Robin Dale is the webmaster for the SEO|SEM|UK Web Hosting at www.teeky.org, offering useful & quality articles and news about Search Engine Optimization, Internet Marketing, Search engine marketing, Dedicated Hosting, hosting tips & UK Web Hosting.

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