In: Root » » SEO » Provide search engine robots with links to navigate through your site
Shape Up Your Site MapAll this fabulous new content on your website might be a lot to navigate. If your site 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. 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 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 101Simply put, a site map is a page that links to every major 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 choose the most important pages. Here are our suggestions for pages to include: • Product category pages • Major product pages • FAQ and Help pages • Contact or Request Information pages • All of the key pages on your paths to conversion, the pages that your visitors follow from landing page through conversion • Your 10 most popular pages Go easy on the autogeneration. Some content management systems will automatically generate a site map. As in so many other areas of SEO, we prefer the human touch. If you, or your tech teammates, are leaning in the automated direction, review the outcome carefully to be sure your site map has these characteristics: • The layout is easy on the human eye. • All links are standard HTML text that can be followed by spiders. • The important pages (included in the preceding list) are easy to find. Look at other sites for design inspiration. Don’t waste time reinventing the wheel. There are zillions of site maps out there on the Web. Use one you like as a starting point. Optimize your site map. We don’t mean you should think of your site map as one of your top-priority landing pages. But if done tastefully, your site map can actually contain a fair number of your target keywords, not to mention compelling text. For example, instead of a link simply labeled “Fungicides,” your site map could contain more keywords: “Organic Fungicides – Product details, how-to tips, and customer reviews of our Earth-friendly garden care products.” Brief page descriptions can help your users find their way, as well as provide more text for search engines to read. Link to your site map from every page. Users have come to expect a link to your site map in the footer of every page on the site, so make use of this spot. If your site has a search box, you may also wish to add a link to the site map near the search box, and make a link to the site map a fixture within the site search results page. By the way, your site map isn’t the same as your Google Sitemap. XML Sitemaps (A Google Sitemap is in this category) allow webmasters to submit URLs and additional page information directly to the search engines. |
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