Site Maps Are Important
Author: glend
From the usability side of things, site maps are very handy in helping your visitors navigate your site and find everything you want them to find. A simple link to your site map on every page will help ensure that your visitors should never get lost.
If you haven’t got one yet then you may want to check this page out at Jakob Nielsen’s site on site map usability - http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020106.html
Site map’s are also useful for search engine spiders. It allows them to crawl all, or most of your pages directly from one page.
Search engines are relatively stupid, they only really understand HTML, so make sure your site map uses links within HTML tags, not image maps, JavaScript links, Flash or so they require session ID’s - most search engines won’t follow these links to the other pages on your site. The site map should include links to virtually every page of your site, or at least to every important section.
Design
Design your site map so it is simple. This is not only relevant from a usability standpoint but removing a whole load of unnecessary features (and therefore code) will allow the spiders to get straight to the important part of your page - the links - so it can follow them onto your other pages.
Add a paragraph at the top of the page briefly describing what your site is all about, with a link to your home page. This means that if the site map does actually rank well for a phrase visitors won’t be confused at landing on the site map page. Visitors are not going to enter your site via the home page every time - this isn’t a bad thing. Every page on your site is a potential entry point.
Describe your links with keyphrases. Once you’ve laid your site map out describe each link with a relevant keyphrase that you are targeting for your site. For example, instead of;
Repairs - we fix ‘em too.
try;
Widget Repairs - Visit our widget repairs studio and get a free quote
Implement
Now you’ve got your site map ready you should add it to your existing navigation. As stated before a link to your site map on every page should mean your visitors are not lost, plus this will inter link all the pages making it easy for the spiders to crawl the site. Don’t bury the site map away either, place it in the root directory so the url should be something like www.yourdomain.com/site_map.htm.
Hope that’s made life a little easier.
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