Lesson (20): Creating a Search Engine Friendly Sitemap

What is a Sitemap?

Sitemaps are often ignored by webmasters. Their value for both visitor-targeted and spider-targeted optimization is underestimated.

What is a sitemap? In the most general terms, it’s a page or pages that contain a list of and link to all the other documents on your site. Theoretically, it’s designed to give your visitors a quick way to find what they are looking for on your site without browsing the entire content. A sitemap also aims at eliminating the need to link to every page of your site from your home page.

In the last few years, sitemaps have gained importance as a SEO factor: they can be utilized to direct the search engine spiders to all of your content-rich pages. This is especially true for large sites, where a number of clicks are needed to get to specific pages through the numerous sections and subsections. If a site has thousands of pages, its webmaster should really consider dividing it into sections to make navigation easy. This can also mean that a search engine crawler needs to do a lot of work to find all of the pages. With a sitemap, spiders feel much more “relaxed”.

Mainly, a sitemap is important because of the following reasons:

• It helps ensure that all of your content-rich pages are exposed to the search engine spider. With lots of pages and a deep link structure, the crawlers would need to work hard to find all of your pages. When you give them one single page which maps to all the necessary content, you make their job easier and ensure that nothing gets missed.
• It gives you a way to spread Google’s PageRank (covered in one of the future lessons) to the pages that need it and distribute it among these pages. PageRank is a very important part of Google’s algorithm but sending it to the right pages may become a headache. So, instead of filling up your home page with internal links, you can use the sitemap to do the job.
• Sitemap can be used for a more advanced PageRank distribution. Say your site has an “About Us” page which is solely designed for your visitors and not targeted at the spiders. If you link to it from every page on your site, such behavior will affect the rankings of your important pages. Instead, you can link to it from your sitemap and only have your important pages linking to each other.

Creating a sitemap gives you a double advantage by offering your visitors more convenience and a better browsing experience and smartly channeling the search engines‘ power. Be sure to include a sitemap as a part of your overall SE Marketing strategy.

Here we list our collection of tips on how to build an effective sitemap.

A search engine-friendly and visitor-friendly sitemap

Your sitemap must only be linked to from your homepage and no other page, because: a) you want the search engine spiders to find this link directly from your homepage and follow it from there and b) according to the PageRank distribution concerns, linking to your sitemap from only your home page will spread the PageRank quickly to pages all over your site.

If you have a large website of 50 pages or more, limit the number of pages listed on your sitemap to a maximum of 30, otherwise it can be mistaken for a link farm by the search engines. Limiting the number of entries to 30 also makes a map much easier for real human visitors to read. This step may mean splitting your sitemap over several pages – don’t be afraid of that, just make sure each of your sitemap pages links to the next. Otherwise both visitors and search engine spiders will find a broken link, lose interest and go away.

The title of each sitemap link should be keyword rich and link directly back to the original page. Always link from your sitemap to your pages using the anchor text that will help those pages with their rankings (i.e. use the keywords for link text that the page you’re linking to is optimized for). Include around 10 – 20 words of textual content from the original page underneath each sitemap link. This creates more content for search engine spiders and human visitors can see exactly what each page is about before clicking. Besides, descriptions help bring the keyword density of the map down to an acceptable level, should this level be exceeded.

Ensure that the look and feel of your sitemap page is consistent with the rest of your site. Use the same basic HTML template you used for every other page of your site.

As a solution for the problem of crawling big websites Google has suggested its Sitemap program. Google claims that its Sitemap Technology was created in order to list sites much faster (http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html). The idea is that you inform Google about your site, the quantity of pages, the frequency of updates and their regular or irregular basis. It also gives you the ability to see your site from the Google’s point of view, i.e. learn about errors

(https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35120&topic=8474). It is free and gives you an opportunity to index new or changed pages on-the-fly if they conform to Google standards.