Building A Good Site Site Map Helps Search Engine Find Your Content.
Have you ever read a book without an index, or seen a town without a phone book? Why should your website be just a lump of independent pages? What good is having a website if the search engines can't see it? Building a site map can be beneficial in more ways then one. Almost all major web sites have a site map and for good reason.
First, your site must be easily accessible to your visitors, as some of them use text based browsers. There is also what is called the 2 click rule. You should be able to go from any page on your site to any other page with only 2 clicks of your mouse. This is a safe way to gauge the ease of navigation on your site.
Second, it makes a world of difference to the search engine spiders. Search engines will only look 2 levels deep. If you submit your home page and have a site map, all of the sites on your site map will be more easily indexed in one session. Having a site map also helps spiders find new content. If you add a new page and already have a fifty page web site it can be very frustrating waiting for the spiders to find and index your new page. If you have a site map , all you do is list it on the site map and the page is two levels deep.You are guaranteed to have your new pages seen by the spiders when you upload it.
Third it helps ease the congestion of your homepage. As your web site expands, there will be more and more clutter on your home page without a site map.
7 Steps To Creating An Effective Site Map
- Get a good idea of the content that the website will contain.
- Find websites which have similar content and view their site map (if they don't have a site map, then build one for the website).
- Build a list of possible categories from the different site maps you've viewed and any others that you may have thought about.
- Gather together categories which can be sub-categories of a more general category (ex. 'audio lectures' and 'video lectures' can be included as sub-categories of 'lectures')
- Write a sentence or two about each category and sub-category, so that you have put all of your ideas down for easy referencing.
- Keep working on the site map until you are satisfied with it, why not even talk it over with a friend of yours (even if he/she isn't a website designer) and see what suggestions he/she can give you to further improve it.
- Always use keywords in text links within your site map. Don't just use, Homepage, or FAQ.
Information
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Tools
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