1 Comment Written by Robert on August 13, 2008 – 3:11 pm

Designing a Sitemap

An effectively designed sitemap increases the likelihood that your site is indexed by search engines. A well-built sitemap displays the inner framework and organization of your Web site’s content to the search engines. A sitemap should reflect the entire navigational framework of your Web site so that search-engine spiders can find and index all your content.

Create a Company Information Page Adding a company information section to your Web site enhances credibility and provides visitors with important information about your business’s history, your management team, and any notable accomplishments or awards received.

The company information portion of your Web site allows users to get to know the people behind the Web site and the business. The presence of this page also builds credibility in the eyes of search engines, and they now try to automatically detect the presence of a company information page. Search engines are constantly striving to better the experience of their users, and providing this type of information can bolster your ranking, while adding credibility about your Web site to your visitors.

Create a sitemap to function as an outline or index of your entire Web site.

You can create a sitemap to function as an outline or index of your entire Web site. You should structure it using the same hierarchy that you used when you created your Web site structure. Start off with your home page and build out from there with all the pages linking to it. Link all the major subsections plus your company information page and privacy policy page from the home page.

All subsequent pages are placed and categorized under that subsection in your sitemap as well. Although not strictly necessary, consider naming the sitemap either sitemap.html or sitemap.php. Such names help the search engines recognize that the file is indeed a sitemap. Automatic sitemap generators like the one at XML-Sitemaps.com help automate this process.

A benefit of having a sitemap is that it gives visitors a place to potentially find what they are looking for without getting lost in the navigation on the Web site. Sometimes, no matter how well you design your internal linking structure, your visitors may have a hard time finding exactly what they are looking for. A sitemap can help your visitors understand the Web site layout, and give them a quick access tool for all the pages within the Web site.

As you add new pages to your Web site, be sure to add them to your sitemap. Search engines tend to reward Web sites with fresh and up-to-date content. A sitemap enables search engines to quickly find those Web pages recently added or changed on your Web site.

XML Sitemaps then generates an HTML sitemap

XML-Sitemaps.com, at www.xml-sitemaps.com, offers a free and extremely easy-to-use automatic sitemap generator for your Web site. All you need to do is type the Web address of your Web site, and the XML Sitemaps spiders crawl through your Web site and index all its pages for you. XML Sitemaps then generates an HTML sitemap that you can place on your Web site. Once your sitemap is created, place a link to it on your home page. The search-engine spiders can find the sitemap and have easy access to each page of your site.

Keep in mind that the search engines can still crawl and index each page of your site without a sitemap as long as your internal linking structure is comprehensive and well designed. However, making certain that search engines find and properly index all your pages is so important that you should have a comprehensive sitemap detailing your internal linking structure.

XML-Sitemaps.com allows you to create numerous types of sitemaps. You can generate an XML sitemap that can be submitted to Google to help the Google spiders crawl your Web site pages. It also allows you to create an XML sitemap that can be submitted directly to Yahoo.