A sitemap is just one page where you have the whole layout of your website. Smaller simpler websites may not necessarily want one, but sites that have a number of pages definitely have to have one. This page is very important for two reasons.
First, if you have or are planning to have a large number of pages on your website, it is better to have one page from where people can navigate to different places on your site. It makes the whole browsing experience simpler making sure that you do not lose any visitors because they feel that navigating your site is too complicated.
Second, this page is important because you can submit this page to search engines to index. This has the double advantage of forcing the search engine crawlers to follow all the links in the page thus indexing all pages and also ensures that your site gets indexed quicker. Sometimes, especially if your site has a large number of pages crawlers do not probe more than two links into the site meaning that pages that lead deeper into your site are left un-indexed.
Many people who have such sitemaps find that this page gets ranked much higher in most search engines for most keywords than the actual page dealing with the keyword giving you the double benefit of a higher ranking as well as making sure that people visit other pages in your site.
How do you organize the sitemap?
This is basically up to you. Some people just have one page where they have links to all the pages on their website. This page will not be visible to the browsing public but will be useful for the search engines to index all the pages on your website. This is the simplest form of having a sitemap.
Others use JavaScript drop-down menus to help navigate their sites, but then the crawlers do not read this. This means that you will have to have a text version of the sitemap done just so that it gets indexed. You can always keep this portion invisible while keeping the scripted portion visible.
The formatting of the page is up to you. Depending on the number of main pages you can follow the traditional top across, or left vertical method. If you are good at designing you can even follow a completely new method. It is however safer to stick with the traditional if only because it gives some familiarity to your website from the point of view of first-time visitors.
The Newbie Guide to Traffic Generation
- Chapter 1 Increase Traffic to Your Website
- Chapter 2 Web Content
- Chapter 3 Don’t Send Newsletters
- Chapter 4 Become a Community Member
- Chapter 5 Get Experts to Write Articles
- Chapter 6 Use Tracking Software
- Chapter 7 Use of Keyword Tools
- Chapter 8 Copy Others
- Chapter 9 Focus on the Popular Portions of Your Site
- Chapter 10 Give Freebies
- Chapter 11 Advertise!
- Chapter 12 Build a Brand
- Chapter 13 The Right Software is Essential
- Chapter 14 Optimize Content
- Chapter 15 Meta-tags
- Chapter 16 Blog
- Chapter 17 Hold-off on Comments
- Chapter 18 Have a Sitemap
- Chapter 19 High Traffic Days!
- Chapter 20 Use Online Communities
- Chapter 21 Be Patient
- Chapter 22 Be Nice
- Chapter 23 Conclusion
