Site Maps can be a good tool for bringing in search engines to spider your site in a more efficient way, thereby facilitating you to get more web pages listed, and in the end bringing you additional visitors.
Many people know what web site maps are, as they could be found on several of the big websites, although for those who do not know, a site map is a web page which carries all the links within a site, under distinct groups and headings, precisely comparable to a table of contents of a book. When a SE checks the site map page, it is able to check each links within that site and this enables it to spider through those web pages. It is precisely like directing SEs with the support of a map, in this big world of internet.
Site maps likewise facilitate visitors to catch an overview of the whole site, and therefore function as a useful navigational tool. It facilitates visitors to detect particular pages by a single page, for which they may have had to trace a lot of links to hit the wanted page. Here are a few examples of well planned site maps.
google.com/sitemap<dot>xml
lycos.com/sitemap<dot>xml
This guides us to the next step, which is how site maps should be built. Designing a site map can be as easy as designing some dynamic pages with no images, artwork, etc. But complete input should be given to keep the structure rational and simplified. It is most adept to surf through the internet, and examine a variety of site maps before you choose what sort of design you would prefer to follow.
Here are a few matters you should consider, before planning a site map.
Homepage Link: it’s significant to generate an important link from the homepage to the site map page, so that visitants and crawlers can easily detect the site map page. As a matter of fact, preferably there should be a link to the site map page from all pages of your site.
Text Links: Simple text links should be practiced for every link, as a few spiders can have troubles crawling through JavaScript.
Categories: it’s significant to arrange the articles into distinct categories, and even sub-categories for simplified navigation of the visitor. Though this does not have direct search engine optimization significances, it holds more significance to the visitor.
Descriptive Content: it’s best to have less content naming the links, as SEs lean to disregard pages, full of links. It’s also significant to utilize your aimed keywords in your descriptive content and anchor text.
Anchor Text Link: it’s significant to utilize page titles as your anchor text, so that you will be able to add your anchor text back links. This is instrumental for SEO as it increases your page rank.
