A site map can also be used by visitors who are looking for a quick short cut to specific information on your site. If a fussy visitor cannot find the information they are looking for quickly, they may abandon your site for a competitor’s.
Another advantage to using a site map is that it provides easy accessability to visitors utilizing a screen reader or other accessibility helper. Pages loaded with graphics can slow a page reader to a painstaking crawl. The site map provides a quick summary of the information available on your webpage while bypassing other graphic laden pages.
A site map is also a backup for broken hyperlinks. It ensures that your entire site gets crawled. One great way to use your site map is to utilize spider friendly html that tells a crawler when you last modified your site, which pages are higher in priority and how often a page’s content is changed.
Just a reminder, not all content is appropriate to be listed on your site map. Duplicate content or any pages excluded on your robots.txt list should be left out of your site map. Also, if you choose to use dishonest SEO (which I do not recommend), don’t list doorway pages-unless you want to be banned from search engines.
A site map should be well organized. The easiest way to compile an organized site map is to incorporate one into the initial creation of your webpage design. If, however, you already have a large website without a site map, there are many free site map creation tools on the web and paid versions available as well. Many programs like Front Page have a site map creation tool built in.
Include default tags, logical page titles and keywords in your site map. While you are creating an index of all of the pages linked to your website’s homepage, it is better to include one or two sentences to describe each link rather than just a boring list of page titles.
A dynamic webpage is difficult for a search engine to crawl. Offering a site map as part of your main navigation map will allow the spider to quickly access your information and give your site a better chance of being completely indexed if you have a large number of pages included in your website.
Site maps are a spider’s best friend. If you want to increase your SERPS ranking, you must meet and greet your site map.
Site Map Tips - To learn more about this author, visit Scott Hendison's Website.
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