Creating a SEO-friendly and visitor-friendly sitemap

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.

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