Site Map Implemetation

An effective search engine optimization campaign should include designing an effective site map. This page is the pillar of any customer centric web site; in addition to letting visitors almost instantly find any page of your site, it also makes excellent fodder for the autonomous search engine spiders that crawl the web indexing sites.

An SEO friendly sitemap ensures that your whole site can be easily indexed, not just a few of the pages. This is because all of your links are held in one centralized location, and all of your pages are no less than two levels down in your site hierarchy, regardless of their physical location on your web server.

The process of a successful SEO marketing plan will result in an increased flow of traffic, but you have to bear in mind the fact that you want people to stay on your site once a search engine has directed them to it. Users should ideally not need to scroll more than a page length across or down to view the whole sitemap.  While this wont impact on your SEO results, it is a point worth knowing for usability.

A site map need not be a complicated page. In fact, it should not be a complicated page for best results; it should be accessible from every page on your site and it should be as simple as possible. At its most basic, it is simply a list of all directories and pages that make up your site.  But just because a sitemap should be simple, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be visually enhanced to fit the style of the rest of your site without your search engine rankings being damaged, although there are certain things that should be avoided.

One important facet of SEO that the experts keep drumming into us is that you must make your site as content rich as possible.  Whilst this is indeed the case, one by-product of a large site is that it needs a large sitemap to cover all this extra content.  It can be tempting to use an image map, or a series of image links, that graphically depicts the structure of your site to save time and add some stunning visuals to your site.

If your site doesn’t have a site map, this is something you need to address right away, regardless of whether you already achieve a high raking or not; in some cases, it may be a contributing factor in why you don’t have a good ranking.  If you do already have a site map, is it optimized for maximum consumption by spiders?  Or is it filled with pictures, badly chosen page titles or unwieldy scripts?

Do a quick search in any of the more high profile search engines for “site map.”  The top ranking sites in each all share one thing in common; their site maps are all just simple pages full of links.  They may be laid out in tables, un-ordered lists or simply as a long list of links, but the pages themselves are simple and effective. This gives the spiders information they can easily digest.  It is important that you do the same.

Coding a sitemap in this way is extremely easy and has the benefits of being easy to maintain and easy to style.  If done properly, the page will also degrade well when viewed with browsers that don’t support CSS.  The example site map I have put together is for a fictional record store. While neither the site nor store exist in reality, I have done it in the way that I would for any site I was optimizing.